In a typical year, New York employees of the magazine publisher Conde Nast must use their vacation days before late December or lose them -- a common policy across corporate America.
But early this month, the company sent employees an email saying they could carry up to five vacation days into next year, an apparent acknowledgment that many scrimped on days off because of the long hours and travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic. "The carry-over will be automatic, and there is nothing further you need to do," the email said.
Conde Nast was not alone in scrambling to make end-of-year arrangements for vacation-deprived workers. Some employers, however, have been less accommodating.
"It's a big issue we're seeing now -- competing requests for time off over the next two weeks," said Allan Bloom, an employment lawyer at Proskauer in New York. "Clients are struggling to figure it out."
Bloom and other lawyers and human-resources experts said there was no clear pattern in how employers were handling the challenge.
Many companies that already allow employees to carry vacation days into the next year -- like Goldman Sachs (generally up to 10) and Spotify (generally up to 10) -- have not felt the need to change their policies.
The same is true for some companies that pay workers for their unused vacation days.
Neither General Motors nor Ford, whose hourly workers can cash out unused vacation days at the end of the year, is making changes this year.
But many workers may find themselves unable to take vacations that they postponed: Salaried workers at both automakers ordinarily lose unused vacation days at the end of the year without compensation.
VACATION ROLLOVER
Other companies have taken steps that could defuse a potential personnel headache and, they say, benefit their workforces in difficult times.
Bank of America, which normally requires its U.S. employees to take all their vacation before the end of the year, said in June that it would allow them to push up to five days into the first quarter of 2021.
Citigroup has typically allowed its U.S. employees to carry vacation days into the first quarter of the next year, but in July it added an inducement: Employees receive an extra vacation day next year if they use all of their 2020 vacation time this year.
Smaller companies have made similar modifications.
Several experts said a philosophical question loomed over vacation benefits: Is the point to ensure that workers take time off? Or are vacation days simply an alternative form of compensation that workers can use as they see fit, whether to relax away from the job, to supplement their income or to drag around with them until the end of time, as a monument to their productivity?
An employer's policies can reflect its views on this question: For all their drawbacks, use-it-or-lose-it rules can help ensure that workers take time off, said Jackie Reinberg, who heads the absence and disability practice of the consulting firm Willis Towers Watson. By contrast, rollover and cashout options imply that vacation is an asset they are entitled to control.
DIFFERENT VIEWS
Still, for many workers, the issue during the pandemic is not unused vacation days so much as insufficient vacation days. Jonathan Williams, communications director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, which represents grocery store workers in mid-Atlantic states, said workers had sometimes been forced to draw down their reserves of paid time off if they were asked to quarantine a second time after a possible coronavirus exposure. Only the first quarantine typically is covered by the employer, Williams said.
And some employees have difficulty taking advantage of the vacation policies their companies offer.
A Target spokeswoman said the company had increased the vacation days that both hourly and salaried workers could roll over into the next year, based on the employee's role and tenure.
Several union officials, employers and human-resources experts said financial considerations drove many decisions about vacation policies during the pandemic. Toyota normally allows hourly and many salaried employees in the United States to cash out up to two weeks of unused vacation days. This year, the company lowered the cap to one week, a change that a spokeswoman said was intended to help avert layoffs.
By both law and custom, many Americans have come to see vacation days more as compensation than as a mandate to take time off.
In a survey by Willis Towers Watson in April, more than half of employers who made or planned to make changes to their vacation benefits said they were doing so because they didn't expect workers to use all their days. About one-third that planned changes said the benefit had become too costly. These laws also may subtly discourage vacations by making them easier to redeem for money or put off indefinitely.
"To me as an advocate, you should be able by law to keep unused vacation time," said Peter Romer-Friedman, an employment lawyer at Gupta Wessler. "But I'm not sure that creates a good incentive."