Time is the Property of the First Estate

Recently a company in California told its employee’s that it would be doing away with accrual on vacation time. They told their employees that starting at a particular point there would no longer be any set in stone thing called vacation time. 

Once an upon a time an employee was a person. A real thing. Self-defined. Self-owned. Self-responsible. He was his own property and his time was his to sell as he wished. In this golden age of humanity, a person could approach a business and ask to be employed by the business. The business would ask for the individual to sell a set amount of their time to the company. During the negotiation process, the individual would agree to the terms if they suit the individual's needs. For the price of that time, both the employee and his new employer agreed by contract to offer some of the employee’s time back to him in the form of vacation. 

This vacation time was a real thing, like time really is, like the person and the business really are. The employee gave eight hours of his day and the employer returned for that eight hours say, thirty minutes. 

But now that contracted relationship of real time is dead. Who defines now how much time an employee can take off? Who determines if it’s a fair amount? 

Since it is no longer a real entity, composed of real action in a real universe, it is now reliant on that oh so ridiculous notion of socialism: how does taking time off relate to everyone else. 

It is no longer your time to take off, nor is it the companies time to offer you as a reward for service, but is instead a non-real, non-accessible thing that someone can determine by the touchy feely goodness or badness that it evokes. 

If an employee went into the time keeping software and put in every Friday until 2029 as vacation, could they say he couldn’t? How can they suggest that 50 or so days off a year is too many? Who owns that authority? And should the employee be able to claim ownership of time that is not something he agreed to give up, if so, isn’t he stealing from the company by not actually living up to his employment contract? How can any of this arbitrated, negotiated? 

IT CANNOT 

It's not based in reality on real contracts. It is no one's time because suddenly we’re all sharing the pot…and like all communisms when the individual is not responsible for determining how his means of production are to be used, it will always be used incorrectly by those that take ownership of it.