I will always take a lawyer up on an offer to talk lawyerly to someone so I don't have to.

Better morning this morning. Even woke up in time for "die, you bastard, die!" on Homicide reruns. I find that funny enough I should have been murder police.(My mother also listed it as her top TV moment...) And Kay sees a ghost. Good times. I should write another Howard/AtS fic, huh?ETA: One of these days, Vortex.

1) They HAVE to take off holidays but they HAVE to use their vacation time to do so.

How can that be legal? I don't think it is.

Nora, probably they didn't do a good job of explaining this. When I first worked for MGH, we had different kinds of time: Vacation, sick time, scheduled holidays, floating holidays, personal days.

After a few years, they revamped the whole shebang. They took away all those kinds of leave, and we just had one type of time: Earned time.

We earned (something like) 2.5 hours per week, and then that time was deducted any time we were off, be it sick, vacation or (scheduled) holidays.

If you were never sick, it was cool, because you could take what amounted to extra vacation. If you were sick with a lengthy illness, it was cool, because you could dip into your vacation time.

The holidays got deducted from the earned time, but they were figured into how much we earned per week, in the first place.

I'm assuming they have fire evacuation plans for emergencies in the locked building. And I understand why they would physically lock down a building with the program for abusive parents with supervised visitation. However--those offices shouldn't be sharing a building with another office! It's unfair to the other office workers being on lock down and it INCREASES security risks if you have other people besides program participants trying to leave or get into the building or otherwise getting aroud the lock down procedures.

That's just fucking stupid.

I'm vibing for Fay and hoping to hear from her.

What about the standard 15 min. break for every four hours worked, plus at least 30 min. for lunch if you're there for six hours? Is it legal to require workers to smoosh their 15 min. together to form a lunch break, and therefore have no coffee breaks in a, say, nine hour day?

Okay, I have bad news. The guy at the attorney general's office (617-727-3465) told me that vacation time and use is at the discretion of the employer. When I specifically asked if the employer could require the employee to use the day, he said yes. I then asked if the employee had the option to not be paid for the day (as opposed to taking the day), and he said that it was at the discretion of the employer.

I asked for a cite, and he gave me Ch. 149, section 148. I had already looked at the section, and did not see anything that I thought applicable. I'm a little rusty, so could one of the other lawyer people take a look and see if they think it applies? [link]

And for God's sake, Mass legislators, learn to use a period! The first 3/4 of the damn page is one run on sentence!!

Were these people raised by wolves?

Wolves have better manners.

As for the holiday leave--maybe they just don't pay for holidays and if you want to get paid, you have to take them as "vacation". And what Cindy said. DH's office has now lumped all their vacation/sick time together and it's very strange.

Some business, depending on their size are also exempt from some labor laws concerning leave/vacation time, etc.

ha! Bev, her son, and I had this conversation last week.

Gronk.

There's nothing that I have to do today. There's some studying and research I need to do, but it could just as easily be done tomorrow. I'm trying to convince myself that I ought to get dressed and go into my office and get some reading done, but it's not really working so far.

Also, in unrelated news, boys are confusing.