Who are we supposed to speak to? The federal government has very few employee regulations. They set the minimum wage and a lot of safety regulations but not much else. There is a Family and Medical Leave Act that does require employers with 50 or more employees to provide certain amounts of leave time but they don’t have to pay for the time off. So, a woman who has a baby can have up to 12 weeks off but she may not get paid a dime. And, again, this only applies to companies with 50 or more employees. We have very few businesses that size in our little city.
Big corporations that have to compete for the best and brightest employees usually have very good benefits. For example, my son-in-law has worked for Intel and Microsoft and had/has fabulous benefits, none of which I’ve seen working for small private businesses.
There are no federal laws requiring paid vacation, sick, or holiday leave. Some states may have laws but I’m sure none of them are in the South. So, as an employee, you are not guaranteed paid time off for holidays, sick leave, or vacations.
Conservative Republicans block every law that the Democrats introduce that will benefit employees. For example, the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 ($2.13 for tipped employees) since 2009. That’s outrageous. But, every year the Democrats introduce a law to increase it and every year the Republicans shoot it down. Some states have minimum wages higher than the federal law — but only 29 out of 50 states.
I’ve never worked anywhere that provided paid maternity leave. And, the benefits I’ve had were always at the discretion of the employer. I was an employee of a law firm for 9 years when they took in new partners who thought the firm was too generous to the employees. We lost our life and disability insurance and our health insurance deductible went up by 200%. We lost 3 paid holidays, our paid sick leave decreased from 10 to 5 days per year, and our paid vacation went from 3 weeks a year to 2. Who could we complain to? No one. The only choice was to quit, which I did, but it took 2 years to find a job that wasn’t worse than the one I was leaving.
In December, one of my clients (one of the most successful law firms in our area) decided not to give the employees a paid day off for New Year’s. There is nothing the employees could do about it.
Working in the United States is not what most of the world thinks. Nearly all first-world countries have better employment conditions than we do.
