I think that if you are allowed five paid sick/personal days off, you have a total of ten paid holidays, then allowing you another fourteen days of unpaid vacation is perfectly acceptable. Parents that depend on day care providers or
"baby sitters, nannies, etc., " need to know that they will have someone that they can depend on because some people that work are not allowed the fourteen days of unpaid vacation. It usually requires a rather large staff to run a day care facility. If a day care worker gets sick and takes off for maternity leave (6-8 weeks), if a worker comes down with a bad case of the flu, is involved in a car accident, or whatever reason you have to miss more than fourteen days of work, then either a substitute is going to have to be brought in or it is going to be double the amount of work for some other workers to divide your children when you are out and I doubt that these people are receiving over-time pay or being compensated for the fact that they have to take care of more children.
I worked as a Legal Assistant for many years. I was allowed one week's vacation, the major holidays such as two days off at Christmas, two days off at Thanksgiving, Easter and Good Friday, New Year's Day, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Independence Day. So that is ten paid holidays plus I had ten days off for sick time and one week's paid vacation. This was
only one lawyer that was paying my salary.
When I found out I was pregnant, I was off eight weeks for a maternity leave, all days which were unpaid, and I took one year of unpaid leave due fifteen months later to a really bad car accident I was involved in that left me disabled to where I could no longer work even a part-time job. I was a salaried worker so if I came in on Saturday or worked from 9 am to 8:30 pm, I was not compensated for the overtime nor was I allowed any "comp" days. Independent people that have a business, including people that run a small mom-n-pop day cares just do not get all of the holidays or nearly as many paid
vacation days off like folks that tend to work for companies like Shell, Exxon, Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue and other big name corporations that tend to average into the hundreds of billions of dollars in sales every year. The extremely large companies can afford to give you more time off and pay you for that time, but it still makes it harder for the other workers because many times someone else has to do your job.
In our legal office, there was no one to take my place unless a temp worker was called in and I had made arrangements beforehand with my boss. Most of the big law firms could easily afford to give out more leniency with the days that an employee was off work than solo practitioners can afford.
The first two years of our son's life, he was kept by a relative.
When that relative had a heart attack, we paid another one of our relatives for almost one year before she decided she had to go back to work full-time. After that, our son was put into a public day care beginning just before his third birthday. He was in Pre-K in the mornings and the same day care after the children were put down for a 1 1/2 hour nap after a 30 minute lunch. The rest of the afternoon our son played with other kids in the day care. He stayed in public day care until he turned 6 1/2 years old. By that time, I was unable to work so I took our son to school and picked him up every single afternoon which saved us money on day care, but since it took me four years before I was awarded my Disability, I didn't have a salary. We depended entirely on my husband and he worked as many hours over-time as possible in order for us to be able to pay our bills. Those were four tough years
for us. Once I finally started receiving SS Disability checks once a month, my husband could cut back on the amount of over-time he worked, if he chose to do so. But there were still a lot of call-outs during the nights when his company needed
him to repair a huge piece of equipment. He worked quite a few sixteen hour days and some of that was done because he
had a certain figure in mind for his 401K which would allow him to retire completely from working, once he reached his goal.
When my child went to day care, I got called to come pick him up if he was running a temperature of 100 degrees or over. I was lucky because my boss understood that some one had to take of our child when he was sick and could not be left in a public daycare. But my husband worked for a very large corporation to where he had ten days of paid sick leave,
up to six weeks per year of vacation (you don't take them, you lose them), but he was filling out a time sheet and he also worked lots of overtime to help keep this company running 24/7. If he worked over forty hours per week, the next day was time and a half. If he worked on a Sunday or holiday, he was paid double-time. His corporation could afford this. Plus if you had surgery, you could take up to six months of sick leave (but you were paid a portion of your salary, not the full amount).
When our relative got sick, one of us has to stay home and take care of our baby. We knew she needed the money and since we had a little more leniency with my husband's job, he could take off or I could take off and both of us got paid, therefore we took care of our relative when something happened and she could not take care of our child. When our child was in day care, if my husband and I did not have the holiday off and the day care was closed, one of us had to stay home and take care of our baby and we were paid, but the day care facility we used did not charge us for holidays or for the days our son missed when he was sick. Many day care facilities charge you regardless of whether your child is there or not because they are smaller companies and they have to pay all of their employees. Otherwise, they would go out of business. To find a day care center today that does not charge you when your child is out sick is extremely hard to find. We also paid our daycare to pick up our son from first grade after school.
Personally, I think you are getting a fair deal. If neither my husband nor I had not been able to take off work without getting our pay 'docked' for the days we took off for a sick child, then matters would have been totally different. Since we had a relative taking care of our child, we paid them for sick days unless it ran over three days because then we had to pay daily to drop our child back off at a public day care in order for us to be able to go to work. When our relative went on vacation, we put our child in day care and we did not pay our relative for those vacation days either.
If we had a nanny or a person that came to our house that we had hired that had not been a relative, no, we would not have paid but for probably two or three sick days because that would have been double paying someone to take care of our child. That doesn't even make sense. They also would not have been given vacation pay or holiday pay because we would be at home with our child, so why pay a person that is someone you hired from an agency or through an interview for all these days off from work?
But we were allowed to do this because I had an extremely understanding boss and my husband worked for a huge corporation. My husband had to be off work in 2005 for knee surgery for three months, so he received a partial pay check, which was outlined in the corporation's employee policy hand book. But if you called in sick more than ten days a year or if you ever fought someone on the premises, brought liquor or did not pass your mandatory drug tests, it was grounds for automatic termination. My husband retired in March, 2007 after working 38 years for the same company. I only worked 4 years for an oil and gas corporation and 11 years for my attorney and then had to file for disability in 1999. It took a little over four years for me to get Disability Benefits, even though I had an attorney representing me. Our family could not operate on only one salary, although my husband made six figures a year. We had a house note, all of our utility bills, one car note at a time, three kids we helped put through college, paid auto, health and flood insurance, plus we had a couple of personal loans that we had to pay.
My point is...if you do not like the policies this Day Care Provider gives you, find another one. I think their policies are fair because somewhere down the line, paying for those extra fourteen days of vacation days is going to cost someone money or someone else is going to have to do your job. We happened to be lucky that our employers were lenient. A lot of things depend on whether you are a salaried employee, whether you are paid hourly, whether the company is a small one or a large one, as to how much the company can afford to pay you.
Both of us are now retired and at an early age because we also managed to save money, which was very tough. My husband and I both stay at home, he draws his S.S. pay, I draw my Disability pay, we have the bulk of our retirement money invested, we are still putting money into savings and our child's college fund, and our last child is a 15 year old sophomore in high school. Our house is paid for and so are
our vehicles; however, in a couple of months, our automobile insurance is going to sky rocket because our teenager is going to be able to start driving.
We still have to watch our money in order to be able to pay for school tax, homeowners and real estate tax on land we are planning on building a new house on once our teenager graduates from high school in two years, and full coverage health and dental insurance, all of the incidentals our son needs for school and to play football, doctor and medication co-pays, so we still have a lot of bills to pay. It is so much easier for a multi-billion dollar corporation to pay for every holiday, xx number of days sick time, and paid vacation leave
than it is for a small business owner. I could never take off an entire week at a time because my boss could not manage without me that long. It worked out to be two days here, a day there, and another day here and there, but two days were as much as I could take off without my boss having to hire a temporary Legal Assistant to come in and do my work while I was off. He did not do that so we could go on vacation for a week, but we had so many other perks, that it wasn't worth complaining about.
You need to decide if this job is really all that unfair. You do realize that unemployment is up consirably right now due to the economy not being so great, don't you? I would hold on to the job that you have until circumstances change considerably
before quitting your current job and looking for another job. Make sure if you do quit, that you already have another job waiting for you; if you don't you can expect the worst possible thing to happen and that is to be unemployed with no money at all coming in. Believe me, you could lose everything.