Senior Oops Engineer

I would speculate that there are two reasons someone might think an unlimited vacation policy benefits them. Before I give them, because Twitter is impossible for nuance, I want to say: I don't think these are the only reasons, and I don't think they are mutually incompatible.

The first is that they are unaware (which is a euphemism for "deceived by capitalist propaganda") of the actual material effects of the policy on themselves and other workers. This is the false consciousness I mentioned.

The second is that they do actually materially benefit. This probably comes in a number of forms: they actually do take more PTO days than they would under a fixed policy; they feel less stress about taking days off because they are not getting closer to some number; and so on.

I think it's useful to think about what conditions have to be in place for this to be possible: first, if we remember the argument of the propaganda piece I cited earlier, it's that the *average* number of PTO days taken was the same.

If this policy is to benefit the business, it either needs to have this property or to have some other property that offsets any losses. This means that if one person takes twice as much time off as average, other people have to take less time off.

So "I personally benefit from this policy" can be entirely consistent with "the workers as a whole are exploited by this policy". In fact, the fact that you personally benefit would imply that others have it even worse than average.

Second, it seems likely to me that a worker with high status or who works for an employer who is more likely to act against class interest (i.e., to benefit the workers) would be more likely to benefit from such a policy. The data point I was provided comports with this belief.

If you are widely regarded as an expert in your field, make a lot of money, and work at a large company that is an outlier in progressive leadership then I am really happy that you can take extra time to take care of your kids. I'm also not going to infer a lot from this fact.

My takeaway here is that "unlimited vacation" is a policy that is *designed* to exploit the workers. Whether it actually does so in a particular case depends on *a lot of things*, including that worker's privilege and that company's willingness to act against class interest.

If you are thinking about joining a company with an unlimited vacation policy, I think it is important for you to understand that it is structurally exploitative and to ask questions like "how much do I trust my potential boss to not exploit me personally?"

This might lead you to ask their employees, especially those with a similar position to the one you're considering, what their experience has been with this policy. That would be a good thing to do imo.

I think the often-cited study that shows that your manager is the largest single factor in your morale at work has a lot to do with whether that manager is willing to act against the interests of their bosses to benefit you and other workers.

How many times have you heard of a manager being a good "shit umbrella"? Well, what else does this mean than ?

A thing I would really like but don't have the resources to accomplish is a survey of the vacation policies of self-directed enterprises, worker coops, etc. /cc @democracyatwrk @profwolff

The policy also has a whole slew of secondary benefits which I can summarize as "alienation is not only a result of capitalism, it is also a goal of capitalism"https://twitter.com/evanburchard/status/1082009220688502784 …

I'm pretty sure this is the same hand. Both are examples of capitalism trying to increase surplus value by exploiting workers' vacation timehttps://twitter.com/gadgetsquirrel/status/1082117351611330560?s=21 …

Many of the objections I've gotten are of the form "my unlimited vacation policy is good actually because my employer does not exploit it" and yes, that may be true, but there is literally nothing stopping them exploiting it tomorrow.