Mostly posting this to vent, but also as a warning to anyone who is considering starting with a company that has a policy like this, or anyone who is in a similar predicament. I'm sure if you've been in this sub for a bit you've already heard about the scam that is “Unlimited Time-Off”, but I'm going to just go through my issues.
First the back story on how my job functions and some company policies: My job requires me to travel for work, domestically and internationally. I will frequently be away on these work trips for 3-6 weeks. When traveling we work 10 hour days and have weekends off, which gives us 10 hours of overtime per travel week, plus the 10-30 hours of travel time since we usually travel on weekends. It's also important to note that any overtime I earn has to be approved well in advance of me taking it. These approvals have to be done down to the amount of extra hours, and with specific reasonings for why they are required, and cannot be exceeded for any reason, and they are approved at the Program Management level. If I can't complete my tasks on time, I still need to clock out at the end of the day, and hopefully I can catch up later. It should also be noted that I am exempt from the FLSA requirements to pay time-and-a-half for overtime, so this labor being charged at my standard rate, just over 40 hours per week.
With our old Paid-Time-Off (PTO) system we accrued PTO hours based on our skill category and amount of time employed by the company, and they were added to our balance in our bi-monthly paychecks. My company only recognizes 5 federal holidays and prior to switching we had 5 additional “floating holidays” that could be used for the remaining federal holidays, but they could also be taken whenever you wanted (and they never added a holiday, floating or standard, for Juneteenth). We had no “sick leave”, that was absorbed into the PTO plan a few years before I was hired on. Because of my busy schedule, it was difficult to take more than a couple days a year off, which would usually be around the holidays, or sometimes immediately after trips just to recover. My strategy was always to take my floating holidays first, then if I needed more than 5 days off, start to dip into my PTO, because if I didn't use my floaters, or I lost my job, I wouldn't be paid out those hours. Because of the limited amount of time I took, after two years with the company I had accrued a relatively large balance and I even sold some of my leave back to the company at the end of my third year (this could only be done at the end of the fiscal year, and had to be submitted 3 months out).
Cue this year's fiscal year-end. One week before the end of the fiscal year, my company sends an email to everyone in the company stating that starting in the next fiscal year, we will be switching to an “Unlimited Time-Off” (UTO) plan. They said our PTO balances would be paid out over the next three years (or immediately upon leaving the company if you leave before the 3 years is up). They said the usual b.s. about how this would afford employees the opportunity to live a more flexible work/life balance, and that, so long as your manager approves the time off, and you're able to complete your work, all time off requests will be approved, and no other changes will be made to the functionality of time off within the company. Three months go by, and that, surprisingly, holds true for the most part. I had a work trip scheduled that started a few weeks into the new fiscal year, and that trip came and went without any issues. I even took some time off before and after my trip, as my colleagues and managers all stated that, with the new policy, we were going to take significantly more time off now that we can't bank it and sell it back. 3 months later I have another international work trip. This is further complicated by the fact that the Thanksgiving holiday is in the middle of this, and we have to come home that week. This means this work trip has 4 25-hour travel days, and 5 weeks of 50 hour days.. all in all 150 hours of overtime in 6 weeks. Two days before I left I had a doctor's appointment to get all of my medications refilled for my travel, and I used the UTO plan to just take the whole day off and get my affairs sorted before traveling. At the end of the first pay period, I'm unable to sign my timecard due to an error popping up. I call my manager and he emails our finance personnel asking what's going on. She replies that with the new UTO plan we are not allowed to take UTO on the same timecard that we have earned OT on, and need to count those hours against our OT. I reply that that hasn't been company policy from the beginning; that I was able to take PTO on the same timecard in the past, and even since switching, I took FTO and earned OT on two timecards since the new fiscal year without it being an issue. She consults her manager and they realize that no official policy has been issued forbidding this and they manually remove the error and push my timecard up and I was paid for all of my hours, including the UTO hours. The problem is that our next pay period included the Veterans Day holiday, where we were unable to go into the office because it was closed (American owned office overseas, that hires a significant percentage of veteran employees). My company is also a veteran heavy organization, but the old PTO plan has Veterans Day as a floater, so we have to take UTO if we can't go to work. My coworkers and I are already on edge from the previous pay period, so we end up finding work we can do from our hotel in order to bill 8 hours and not eat into our OT. All 5 of us are veterans, and we're being forced by our company to find work to do on a holiday that is supposed to be dedicated to us, while we are thousands of miles away from our family making money for this soulless corporation, just to not have them steal money from our paychecks. I'm now on an airplane home for my week break for Thanksgiving. Luckily that's an actual holiday, so my colleagues and I won't lose money from that, and they will all be working that week to avoid losing their overtime, but I had a family member die while I was overseas, and my one week home will be entirely filled with taking care of familial affairs, and I'll likely be losing 32 hours of hard earned overtime pay.
I have already started looking for a new job, and I'm sure many more are as well. The overtime pay is basically the only thing that makes it worth it to be away from my family for such long stretches of time. We've already had at least a dozen people I know within my organization within the company leave for other opportunities as a direct result of this new UTO policy and that was before we were losing OT. I've also heard of others outside my organization within my company being released for taking too much UTO.