Paid Time Off

At its best, paid time off is one of the greatest benefits in the workplace.  People work for compensation of one kind or another that these days mostly takes the form of money or something directly exchangeable for money (like stock shares).  To mentally or physically labor in a professional sense without payment--unless an employer or employee voluntarily forgoes it because of special circumstances like charity--is to go unrewarded.  Paid time off allows for a break from work without a gap in compensation.  As significant of a benefit as it can be, it often comes with major restrictions and can still be a means of workplace exploitation when it comes to having to get it approved by hostile or petty managers.

For one thing, the accrual rates can be so slow for some businesses that it would take months and months just to have enough PTO to cover a single day or two's worth of working hours, and there could be caps so that only around 40 hours of PTO can be held at a time--enough to approximately take a single full-time workweek off while still receiving compensation.  As for employers as opposed to overarching corporate policies, some of them might deny "requests" for PTO even though the accrual and use of it is a benefit they themselves offered to their workers, perhaps lamenting how time away could affect the remaining employees who supposedly always have to work harder during the absence.

A worker has the right to use their paid time off whenever they wish except if they have promised to commit to a task only to use PTO to deceive an employer.  After all, they earned it, and they are not the ones to blame if a manager or employer did not hire enough people to actually keep their company functioning when an employee uses this promised benefit--especially when paid time off is used in the case of a sudden, unplanned emergency.  The kind of manager that would object to this is either an egoistic, arrogant person who tramples on others to exercise power or is an utterly incompetent leader who cannot utilize other resources when someone is away.  He or she is irrational either way.

They can respectfully ask the employee to consider a different day to use their PTO, of course, without demanding that they comply and without denying them something they have already earned.  It is also not oppressive to deny or place additional conditions on granting PTO that has not yet been earned, for the worker would have to labor in order to make up for what they have been paid for without working.  More than just these few scenarios might be all too common in different workplaces, however.  Paid time off is advertised as a useful benefit to attract workers and can still be held out of reach by all sorts of arbitrary requirements or manipulative policies.

For all of its faults as a company, Amazon actually has very flexible and accessible paid time off options for even low-level white or blue badge warehouse workers.  Submitted through an employee app without having to notify an overseer, PTO can be applied a few minutes at a time to cover portions of a shift if someone has to arrive late, leave early, or take a break in the middle of a shift.  Other companies offer something else: unlimited PTO, which could be withheld by asinine management or end up discouraging workers from using this benefit since they have no accumulating balance that caps out or does not carry over from year to year, which provides a basis for urgency.  As appealing as unlimited PTO might seem at first, like ordinary PTO and other workplace benefits, it can be used as a trap or a tool of exploitation by a specific kind of irrationalistic manager/employer.