A woman took to TikTok to tell the story of how she was labelled “not a team player” by work friends after she refused to donate her unused PTO days to help her desperate colleague
Would you give up your paid holiday days if you were asked to by a colleague?
It’s an awkward predicament one American woman found herself in recently. As she denied her co-worker the benefit, she’s been branded “selfish” by some in her workplace.
In the USA, several companies have leave donation programmes where employees are able to donate their annual leave days to each other. It is often used to donate days off to people going through a difficult time in their personal life.
However, people don’t always want to give up their hard-earned holiday days. That’s what happened with this particular worker – and the argument has gone viral on Reddit, where she asked for advice on the situation.
The anonymous poster said: “I told her ‘hey I’m really sorry you’re going through this, I feel for you, but unfortunately I have some stuff planned for next year’ and also that I have some older mother and father that, you know, their health is also up and down.”
Her co-worker, Rachel, was disappointed but seemed to accept the answer initially. However, the following day, she said how some of her colleagues had come up to her, as apparently word had gone out that she had denied Rachel her PTO days.
The employees told her that she wasn’t being a team player but not giving Rachel her PTO days, which has caused a bit of a stink.
The Redditor continued: “I’m like, those are my PTO time that I earned working… I feel like I should be able to use it any which way I want to. On top of that, Rachel shouldn’t have been coming around soliciting for PTO time. Those were things that are done anonymously. No one should be going around asking for unused PTO time.”
Asking if she was in the wrong for not giving away her days off, thousands of comments reassured her that she’d done nothing wrong.
“Rachel shouldn’t know you have unused PTO. Am I tripping or that is something only certain members of staff should know?” one person asked. Another one wondered why Rachel couldn’t just buy more PTO days for herself.
Meanwhile, a third added: “Never donate PTO!! That’s giving away your salary. No! Just no!” So what would you do in this situation? Let us know in the comments below.
