My relative’s boss refuses to give her time off. What can we do?

4 days ago 8

A close family member – I’ll call them Maria – is struggling to get time off work. She has been at the same business for many years and has worked long hours for the entire time. She has never taken long service leave and only gets a small amount of annual leave at a time convenient to the boss – when the business is closed.

She would have accumulated many months of long service and annual leave. However, her boss considers Maria essential to the operation of the firm and won’t let her take leave outside this time. This is a problem, not just as a matter of principle, but due to a special occasion coming up, which currently Maria won’t be able to attend.

I’m at my wits’ end. I fear that Maria is going to work herself into an early grave because she’s not willing to stand up to the boss. And the special event simply won’t be the same without her. Any advice?

Sometimes, workplace problems are entirely due to the inconsiderate actions of your boss.

Thanks for your long and very detailed email, which included multiple particulars we’ve had to remove from the final question.

First off, your relative’s employer can legally only refuse her leave for a ‘genuine, sound, business reason’, and the reason has to be well-documented. Even if she is as essential to the running of the firm as you suggest, they cannot continually knock back her leave requests unreasonably.

That aside, you wondered in your longer email whether this was mainly a boss problem or a Maria problem. Based on everything you’ve told me, this is unquestionably a boss problem.

Yes, Maria sounds like she’s struggling to challenge her superior and their longstanding denial of her right to take leave when it suits her. I can see how her reticence would be frustrating to you and other family members who love her and desperately want her to be at this once-in-a-lifetime event. But it pales in comparison to the boss’s behaviour.

This is no substitute for the boss getting a cold, hard reality check and coming to understand that this isn’t Dickensian England.

The most generous I can be about this person is that they have become so welded to this business that it has essentially become a part of them. For this reason, they have become blind to even the most basic common sense and have lost the faintest regard for the wishes, wellbeing and entitlements of the very people who keep the business running. Sadly, that includes Maria.

I have some sympathy for this hypothesised version of the boss. They have, probably without meaning to, lost themselves in a commercial venture and may have no way of returning to a life many of us enjoy – one in which the professional and personal remain entirely separate.

But I have absolutely no sympathy for their decision to foist this unhappy life upon anyone else. That seems to be precisely what they’re doing to Maria. So, no, this is very much a boss problem.

How does Maria overcome it? It sounds like the threat of resignation is out of the question. Maria has been at this workplace for too long to suddenly pull up stumps and begin again elsewhere.

It also sounds like even if Maria plucked up the courage to demand time off for this special occasion, she has convinced herself it would be a futile exercise; no amount of explanation from her would convince the thoroughly stuck-in-their-ways boss that it was warranted.

So let me propose something that may initially sound a bit off-the-wall: what if Maria doesn’t affect the change. What if you do? What if you, and perhaps other members of your family, petition the boss?

You could do it with a sternly worded letter highlighting how unfair and tyrannical it is to severely restrict an employee’s personal life for the sake of a business – and how worried you are about her wellbeing.

I know, however, you desperately don’t want to get Maria in trouble, so I think a better option might be to accentuate the positive: to outline in a carefully worded email (or even a handwritten letter) how thoroughly unimaginable it would be for this never-to-be-held-again family event to go ahead without Maria in attendance, and why that makes it vital that Maria can take leave outside the “usual” times.

This, of course, is no substitute for the boss getting a cold, hard reality check and coming to understand that this isn’t Dickensian England, and labour isn’t mere meat for the industrial grinder. But for now, and for your specific purposes, it could just be enough.

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