responding to a nosy coworker, is discussing a march too political for work, and more

by Alison Green on March 6, 2025

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Was talking about a march for science too political for work?

I’m hoping you can help settle a disagreement a friend and I are having about a situation that came up in my work today.

I work as a physician at a large academic hospital, and my department had our monthly faculty meeting today. As part of the meeting, our department chair discussed the current state of NIH funding going to our department. We do a large amount of research and have a number of labs dependent on NIH grants that may be affected by the current administration. He told us that there is a march for science this Friday (they are being held simultaneously in cities all over the country) and suggested that anyone who is interested and able to attend should do so, but not to wear anything that would identify us as employees of this hospital or to give any comments that could be seen as being on behalf of the hospital.

On a basic level, losing funding risks labs getting shut down and my colleagues losing their jobs. I would argue that most, if not all, of us work here because of the reputation of this institution and the research performed here is a big part of that. (Trust me, we get paid less than we would at many other similar hospitals because we believe in what we do).

My friend thinks that this was wrong for my chair to do because it is mixing politics in a professional environment. I see this as the chair providing us with information about the situation and encouraging us to advocate on behalf of our hospital, colleagues, patients, and research. What do you think? (I’m planning to march.)

I’m with you. Your chair was providing information that many of you would find relevant to your jobs, and was also providing info you might not have had otherwise (to not identify yourself as employees of the hospital or appear to be speaking on its behalf). “Don’t mix politics in a professional environment” applies when it’s something like announcing a campaign rally for a candidate or promoting a pro-choice march if your jobs had nothing to do with reproductive health care. It doesn’t apply when the issue in question is so tightly entwined with your labs’ ability to survive.

2. How are these layoffs happening so quickly?

I used to work at a large NGO that receives a lot of government funding. With the recent administration change, I’ve seen many of my old colleagues, including many who work in non-government-funded positions, announce that they’ve been laid off.

How can these layoffs be happening so quickly? It seems like within one week, funding that took months to secure has vanished. Is the funding truly gone? Or are these companies using this as a reason to let people go? Plus, how can it be affecting non-government-funded positions so quickly? I thought WARN notices were required before eliminating jobs.

Yes, it can happen that quickly (and is). First, while a position may not be directly government-funded, it can depend on grants or other sources of funding that have government funding somewhere in the chain. Second, some funders are changing their funding priorities in response to the new administration’s actions. Third, making adjustments in one area can affect a different area; for example, an organization might realize it’s going to lose $X in funding over the next year so they’re reconfiguring staffing and budgets now in order to prioritize programs A and B, even though that will mean cutting programs C and D.

The WARN Act requires most employers with 100 or more employees to provide 60 days notice if they’re laying off 50 or more people at once or to pay the equivalent amount of time in severance. If they have fewer than 100 employees or they’re not laying off 50+ people, it wouldn’t be in effect.

3. Responding to a nosy coworker

My coworker is well-meaning and big-hearted but doesn’t have a lot of personal boundaries. She shares a lot about her own personal life issues such as past family drama and medical issues, also shares personal life and medical issues of her children and husband, and has even shared very personal information from coworkers.

I’ve also noticed her tendency to not just overshare, but pry a bit as well. For example, I had to share the news of a recent death of a distant coworker we did some work with (relevant to our jobs) and she demanded to know who I heard it from (really not relevant). Overall, I like her but she can be really off the wall with certain comments at times.

Today, I sent my team a notification letting them know I’d be stepping out for a dentist appointment for my regular, twice-a-year cleaning. After that, she sent me a private message along the lines of, “We both have more medical appointments than the rest of the team! I’m not trying to pry — you don’t have to share any details — but I’m sending thoughts and prayers and wanted to make sure you’re okay!”

Not only is this a weird comment, but, frankly, I don’t! This year I had a normal annual physical, two dentist appointments, and then the occasional “thing” that might come up for anybody, like seeing an allergist this year. That’s pretty much it.

We have a pretty casual work culture where we’re salaried and free to take off for appointments as long as our work is done, so I’m wondering if she’s confusing personal appointments (car appointments, etc.) for medical appointments? I don’t always give details when I step away for an appointment so she may be assuming what the term “appointment” means.

I responded with a quick “Hey thanks but I’m healthy, just good about getting my checkups!” and moved on. But I would love to hear if there’s a better way to handle coworkers bringing up something like this and setting good boundaries. Do I ignore? Eyebrow raise and say, “How odd, what makes you say something like that?” (I’m not sure she’d pickup on that level of subtly.) Go nuclear and say, “Whoa, that’s way inappropriate”?

We have a cordial but distant relationship on the whole, mainly on my part because of her tendency to overshare or gossip. Given that, although this was definitely crossing a serious boundary, it hasn’t been a persistent issue and I’m not sure how strong of a response something like that would require.

Nah, your response was fine. It allowed you to just quickly move on rather than getting in a discussion of boundaries with her, which is a fine choice to make (unless you want to get into it with her).

Sometimes the key with people like this is to just studiously not take the bait. So you also could have just ignored her message entirely (particularly since she said she wasn’t trying to pry! let’s pretend to take her at her word).

4. Should I address a rumor about my company being awful?

I am a payroll specialist who processes payroll for over 1,000 electricians. Today I heard that there is a rumor going around one of our largest sites that my company lays people off after 90 days to avoid paying out any sick time (field employees can accrue and use up to 40 hours per year, but can’t use it until their 91st day of employment).

This is not true! We are a leading electrical contractor in our state and, honestly, the time and resources it takes to onboard employees would hardly make it financially sensible to be laying people off willy-nilly. Not to mention getting such an unethical practice like this past the union!

What I heard specifically was this: a site administrator told me “I heard someone say…,” meaning a current employee. In my experience, these things spread like wildfire among the crew(s). And the admin seemed genuinely relieved when I told her that it wasn’t true so I’m afraid people are actually believing it!

Should I say something? I have a good relationship with both my manager and our director of field personnel. Should I tell them what I heard?

I don’t think there’s enough here that you really need to act on it … but if you’re concerned that there’s misinformation out there, there’s nothing wrong with sharing that concern with your manager and/or the field personnel director and letting them decide if they want to address it. Just be careful to specify exactly what you heard, so it’s clear that you’re not hearing it from multiple people (which doesn’t mean multiple people don’t believe it — maybe they do — but you don’t want to overstate what you actually know).

5. Can I be told to use PTO for partial-day sick leave when I’m exempt?

I’m a salaried exempt computer programmer working from home, which means sometimes I have the luxury of working a few hours beyond the weekly 40 when inspiration strikes.

Yesterday, I wasn’t feeling well so I stopped working at about 10 am. My boss asked today if I was going to file for PTO or if I’d be making it up.

I’ve read your post here to make sure I was right about the FLSA. It’s come up before, but I’m not sure he believed the bit about how working any part of a week means getting paid for the full week. Anyway, he’s a good supervisor and we have a friendly relationship, but how do I tell him he’s wrong about this?

I asked an AI and it said my company could require that I take PTO when I’m sick, but that doesn’t seem right — so I thought I’d ask a real intelligence.

The AI got it right. As an exempt worker, you need to be paid your full salary when you work any part of a week (with some narrow exceptions, like your first and last week at a job), but that’s is only about pay. It doesn’t have anything to do with docking time from your PTO balance, and your company can still require you to use PTO for time that you miss. It’s pretty common for companies to do that, particularly when you’re missing nearly an entire day of work. (I’d consider it nickel-and-diming you if they told you to use PTO for an hour here and an hour there when you’re regularly working extra hours, but in this case you missed nearly a full day of work so it’s not that outrageous.)

Related:
my manager is nickeling and diming me on vacation time while I’m working 27 days in a row

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{ 267 comments }

{ 267 comments… read them below }

  1. Anon4This*

    #4 – At least your company lets you use sick leave in increments. Mine only lets us exempt people do full 8-hour days which means if I stop working with a migraine midday on a Thursday, I either have to work 12 hours on Friday or burn 8 hours of leave to hit the expected 40. Ugh.

    1. Cmdrshprd*

      I actually think this is what OP has to do as well, and part of the frustration/reluctance. they have to file for PTO for a full day.

      In your specific situation do you have to take PTO for leaving an hour or two early.

      I would say expecting you to make up some time is understandable for 36 vs 40, but if you work 38 or 39 you shouldn’t have to use PTO. do you actually have to make it up on Friday could you do it on Saturday?

      1. mlem*

        I’m not the user you replied to, but for some (US) companies, it’s quite restrictive.

        My company requires all full-time staff to account for at least 8 hours a day (even though we’re almost entirely salary/exempt, and we’re in software rather than a billable-hours profession like law). Individual groups will sometimes allow the occasional making up of hours on a different day, typically within the same week, but our monthly time reports are company-wide and each such occurrence must be logged as an exception.

        If *I* leave an hour early today? I’m generally expected to use sick or personal time for that hour, or to have started an hour early. If I only work half the day, I have to account with the other half with sick, personal, or PTO (vacation time that can only be taken in four-hour blocks). It’s frustrating, but I’m used to it.

      2. Sloanicota*

        But OP didn’t leave an hour or two early, they knocked off at 10AM right? If I’m understanding and they started at 8 or 9 AM they only worked an hour or two out of a day. In my job I would have to take 8 hours of PTO for that (you can only use it in 4 hour blocks). Which is one reason it’s better to decide the AM that you’re not going in versus later in the day. I would probably take a long lunch later in the week to get my hour or two back (wouldn’t tell my boss that was my logic, would just do it).

        1. Cmdrshprd*

          I was saying if they “made up” the time on another day to not use a day of PTO.

          OP left at 10 am assuming they start at 9, that means that week they would be at 33 hours, they can make up 5/6 hours on another day(s) to put them at 38/39 hours total for the week instead of using 8hrs of pto. My point was then its not really different from leaving an hour or two early one day. As salaried that would be the company nickle and diming you.

    2. Tradd*

      I’m salaried exempt and if I work a partial day like in the letter, I have to either make it up by working extra hours that same week or taking sick time/vacation time, as appropriate. I get 5 sick days and 10 vacation days. If I go home sick at lunchtime, I’d be taking 4 hours sick time. It’s been this way every place I’ve ever worked since the 90s.

      1. Nilsson Schmilsson*

        I’m curious…when you work over you’re 8 (or whatever your workday is), do you get to knock off early some other day?

    3. AnotherOne*

      My office does 4 hours (9-1 for morning and 1-5 for afternoon as a general rule)- which has essentially turned into, if you feel crappie at noon and are just like I can’t anymore, it gets called that you’ve worked the morning and are taking the afternoon sick.

      I have taken 4 hours in the middle of the day, but how we show availability has always been in mornings and afternoons so the middle of the day stuff just throws it all off.

    4. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Wow, that’s a terrible policy! I guess I can kind of see only allowing half-day increments of sick leave (easier for the payroll dept to deal with), but only letting people take a full day and no less than that? Ugh, that stinks.

    5. Velociraptor Attack*

      My workplace doesn’t offer incremental PTO. If you work at least 4 hours and are out the rest of the day, you don’t have to use any PTO, which is great. However, if, like with OP, you work 2 hours and go, you have to use a full day of PTO.

  2. Certaintroublemaker*

    For LW4, is there an all-employee newsletter? Bulletin boards everyone sees? Website? Regular company social get-togethers? What I’m thinking is doing a regular (monthly / quarterly / annually) announcement to say, “Congratulations to [list of people] who have reached their one year anniversary with us! And our other milestone celebrants, 5 years [list of people], 10 years [list of people], etc.” This would make it obvious people do stay!

    1. Alison but not that Alison*

      I work at a company that did this- one woman got very upset when it was announced she had been with the company for quite a long time (it was 15 or 20 years I think, and she was concerned about ageism). I am not sure how widespread that concern is, so I am not sure if it is a useful warning to give but she was very upset and it stuck with me as a thing to watch

      1. BatManDan*

        Some people aren’t happy unless they are unhappy. Many very successful, very large companies celebrate milestones like that.

      2. Owlette*

        My company does this, but the people that are here 10+ years always get big congratulations! I understand the worry about ageism, but I feel for most people, working at the same company for such a long time is a badge of honor. Especially in a world where it’s so hard to stay at one job for so long.

        Also, I’ve been working at my current job for 8 years, and I’m only 32. So I’ll be only 39 if/when I hit my 15 year mark. I don’t think I’ll be too worried about ageism at that point! (Knocking on all the wood lol)

      3. Cookie Monster*

        We celebrate employees’ milestone anniversaries at my job but we always ask first if they WANT their anniversary publicly acknowledged. I’d say about 5-10% say no.

        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          That’s smart! I hate attention in all forms, especially at work, and even if it’s positive. I’ve had my work anniversary taken off the common calendar (along with my birthday, which I really hate to have mentioned) and no one remembers when either are, which is great.

    2. Marion Ravenwood*

      I work in internal communications and have done this sort of thing quite regularly in previous jobs, usually combined with the new starters/leavers announcements. If I was OP #4 I’d get in touch with their comms team (if they have one) and ask what they could do to help with getting this out there.

    3. Susie and Elaine Problem*

      This is a good idea. Even when there is no “reputation problem” I think it’s good when an organization reminds employees of their benefits.

      Example: I got bombarded by information during my onboarding and missed the fact that my organization will reimburse up to $150 annually in health/fitness expenses (gym memberships, health classes, nutrition counseling). It was last year I got an email with “employee health tips” that mentioned it – I could have been using this for years!

      Also reminding people on PTO policies, etc. is also good to do periodically.

      1. Anonym*

        Yes! Ensuring that people are and remain aware of important information is never a one and done kind of thing. I’ve had the exact same experience with not realizing I had certain benefits until I got a reminder about them.

    4. Mystik Spiral*

      Hi, I am LW4! We do have a quarterly newsletter, and we do celebrate length of service. It is sent with pay stubs, so whether or not the employees read it is another matter lol. I do payroll for about 1500 union electricians, so the nature of the work is fluid to begin with. We have a lot of travelers who will sometimes ASK to be laid off to go work for their home union. We have jobs ending and new jobs starting all the time. Sometimes the new jobs are somewhere that employees may not want to go, so they ask for a lay off instead of a transfer. In my experience, most of the people who are laid off in their first 3 months have an attendance problem, or have violated a safety policy.

      I haven’t head anything other rumbling since I wrote to Alison, so hopefully that is good news! The gossip at these job sites is just unreal. I do the sick time tracking, and I can say that every week I am removing people from the “not eligible” to “eligible” because they reached their 90 days. My company has been very good to me and hearing this rumor really bothered me! It’s not something that would typically get under my skin, but for whatever reason, it did this time.

      We did just have a big round of layoffs, but my Director of Field Operations told me that the unemployment rate with the Union Hall was 20%, and that’s statewide, not just our shop. And as someone who was aware of all the layoffs, I can say it was a mixed bag of newer and more established employees.

  3. Cmdrshprd*

    OP5 IMO you are being given a choice that seems pretty fair. You can make up the 6/7 hrs, I wouldn’t feel compelled to be so strict, like make up 5 or so that plus the 1 hr you already worked is 6, no different than leaving 2 hrs early one day.
    Or if you have other things going or just don’t feel like making it up, using 8hr when you were out 7 is not a big deal. if you really feel like being even leave 1 hr early another day.

    leaving at 10 really is missing the entire day.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I have to disagree with you here that leaving at 10 is missing the entire day. If you do an hour of work you didn’t miss the entire day. But I do agree that asking him to use his PTO/sick leave is totally valid. I mean, if OP normally works 45-50 hours a week and just had this one day where they didn’t work their full hours, then it’s a bit rich for boss to be asking OP to use their PTO, but on the whole I don’t think it’s so terrible for OP to be asked to do that.

      1. Nobby Nobbs*

        I think whether there’s any point to coming in if you leave at ten is highly contextual. Our operations manager, for example, dragged himself in half dead on Tuesday to get hours corrected and submitted on time for payroll then went home immediately afterwards, which is very much not nothing.

      2. Cmdrshprd*

        You are right working one hour is not literally missing the entire day, but for the most part/practically it is missing the entire day, and being asked to use 8 hrs of PTO is not unreasonable assuming, that OP is able to leave an hour or two here and there without using PTO.

        At the end if work does not nickle and dime you for an hour or two, you should give the same courtesy in return. If that is not the case then yes OP can make sure if they need to use 8 hrs of PTO that they are out for 8 hrs, either all one day or 7 hrs one day and 1 hr the next.

        1. Lenora Rose*

          From the way the LW wrote, they mention being able to work longer when inspiration strikes, but don’t mention leaving early. It’s not explicitly stated as such, but I wonder if the reason for the letter is that they DO often work 50 hour weeks and are now being dinged for a rare exception (and therefore the workplace is in fact nickel and diming *them* by not counting those extra hours to their benefit now).

          Because it’s ALSO been said of exempt workers that they’re allowed to leave early on occasion if they worked extra long hours previously, and until this discussion now of 40 hour weeks, I hadn’t heard that it was so strict that (hypothetical example) working 3 50-hour-weeks in a row, then one 32 hour week, would still mean an exempt employee was dinged for time off in that final week.

    2. Corrupted User Name*

      My staff and I are exempt and the recommendation for our group is take PTO if it’s over 4 hours, and make up anything under 4 hours. In a case like the OP’s, I’d suggest taking 8 hours of PTO and as their schedule allows, wrap up work an hour or two early another day that week. But really, unless their workday starts at 6am, ending at 10am due to illness warrants a full day off and then perhaps a little bit of flexibility so they don’t feel “cheated” of a few hours here and there.

    3. Juliepaislie*

      It does seem like a lot of the day, but we don’t know what time OP started work. Maybe they worked 2 hours, or even 4.

      “Standard” work hours at my org are 8-4:30 (mandatory unpaid 30 min lunch). And there’s a lot of flexibility, as long as your hours are between 6 am and 6 pm.

    4. Joron Twiner*

      Depends how much sick leave you get, if you can use it in increments, and how easy it is to make it up.

      I agree that the worker in this case would be gone most of the day so it’s not nickel-and-diming to ask them to use PTO.

      But if you only get a little PTO, you have to use a whole day instead of a couple hours, and it’s the end of the week/month so you can’t easily make up the time instead… I understand feeling upset about a precious commodity being wasted.

  4. TimeOffNorms*

    OP5, every exempt job I’ve ever had required you to hit 40 hours each week or take some form of time off for the missed hours. This is true even if you work 38 or 39 hours. Most are perfectly happy to have you make up time missed one day some other time during the week, but you still need to hit 40. Usually even when you worked 70-80 hours the week before.

      1. Silver Robin*

        yes and it is the downside of being salaried. You do not really get time in lieu when you work over time. It is just expected that managers be reasonable about this stuff…ha

        1. Analyst*

          um…no, that is not how that works, not in any decent place. I work 50 hours one week, I absolutely work a shorter week later. You want me to work more than 40 hours, that’s the deal. Or you can have exactly 40 hours, never more

          1. amoeba*

            Yeah, I mean, I’m not in the US but I’d say our system is pretty similar to salaried – and we can absolutely make up time in another week. We either track our hours and need to be at 40 average at the end of the years (what I do) or it’s all “trust-based” and we’re supposed to keep an eye on it – but again, over the whole year/quarter/whatever, so that in slower times you’ll absolutely work less than 40 h per week. A minimum of 40 with no overtime if you work more than that certainly exists in some places, but that’s a pretty shitty deal and not then standard!

            That said, missing almost a whole day would also be a PTO case here.

          2. Silver Robin*

            “not in any decent place”

            we have lots of examples that decent places are hard to find. I watched my father regularly work 60 hours weeks as a senior manager and he thought that was so normal that he would consider junior employees who clock out at 5 to not be go getters, even if they completed all of their work.

            I work at a decent place, but I would have to say something to my boss if I wanted to take a day off after working 50 hours last week and he would have to agree. He probably would, but there is no official way of tracking my hours and then using the extra ones I work to reduce my hours later.

            And I am not talking about flexibility over start times or an hour or two, because the letter is talking about a chunk that is functionally equivalent to a whole day.

        2. Bumblebee*

          This is exactly how it works for me as staff in academia, even at my current fairly-senior level. There is no such thing as comp time once you become exempt, and one former HR director who was usually pretty good once explained it as, “If you are exempt you are expected to work a minimum of 40 hours a week.” Thank goodness for reasonable managers who did not clock-watch like this!

      2. Nebula*

        It’s not universal, my experience has always been that it’s flexible i.e. you get time off in lieu. Not that I’ve ever worked a 70-80 hour week, but if I have worked overtime then I’ll work shorter hours the following week. However, starting work and then stopping at 10am would count as a sick day – if you’re going to take a whole day off, it’s still normal that this would have to be approved in advance, unless it’s because you’re ill or whatever – as in this case.

    2. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      Sounds a very different system in the US – is it because salaried people somehow hate regard clocking in/out and so there is no independently documented proof of how much overtime?

      My salaried jobs in Europe had automatic clocking in/out whenever I badged in/out, so every minute I worked over went in my comp time account, to be taken at quieter times during the week/year, e.g. comp days, leaving early, longer lunch. I loved the flexibility once these computerised badging systems came in (around 1990).
      However, even before then, we still had comp time, just not as flexible and we had to estimate extra hours earned, scribbling frantically on paper forms which then needed the manager’s signature (never refused afaik)

      1. Snow Globe*

        That’s not necessarily standard (and maybe it varies by industry?). I work in the US and I’ve never had to use PTO for taking an hour or two for a medical appointment.

        1. Bast*

          It also depends on how much of a stickler your boss is and how difficult they want to make it. I have worked in the same field for years (salaried throughout the majority of it) and while in my current job, taking an hour or two out for a medical appointment would be no big deal, I had other jobs where it would be expected that I would either take the time out of my PTO or make it up. The job where I had to make it up was quite toxic in other ways too — as Old Boss put it “Salary means 40 is the MINIMUM you should be doing” aka you were always expected to go “above and beyond” and work a 45 or 50 hour week without complaint. It did not, however, work the other way around. It didn’t matter if I worked a 50 hour week the week before — pigs would fly before it was ever acceptable to leave early for an appointment and NOT make it up.

      2. Don’t know what to call myself*

        I feel like the problem is that since salaried workers are exempt from the law that dictates how overtime is handled and the US doesn’t have any national laws about sick leave (apart from the FMLA which just says your boss can’t fire you for taking sick leave of 12 weeks or less), every company is going to have its own system for how to handle this stuff. Some companies will give their salaried staff comp time when they go over 40 hours, some won’t. Some companies will let all those extra hours you worked cover for the time off you need for a doctor’s appointment, some won’t. There are very few laws protecting American workers, and even fewer of them apply to salaried workers.

      3. Amy*

        I’ve never had hours tracked as a salary employee in the US.

        I’m technically 37.5 hours. Some weeks I probably work 34, some weeks 40. No one is focused on the hours as long as I’m getting my deliverables done.

        1. AngryOctopus*

          Same. And nobody cares if I have to go early for a medical appointment. It’s about getting the work done.

      4. amoeba*

        Eh, a lot of jobs in my industry in Germany have “trust-based work time”, which basically just means no tracking at all. They’re really fighting against implementing clocking in and out for higher level positions as well – pretty sure that’s because they know they’re getting a ton of unpaid overtime out of people this way!
        You do still have the flexibility to work less one week if you’ve had a lot of hours the week before – but if you don’t actually have the numbers anywhere, I’m sure people use that a lot less than with an actual overtime account where you can clearly see how many hours you have.

        1. AngryOctopus*

          The only time I ever had to track time (aside from being actually hourly) was when we had to track time on projects worked, for collaborator payment/audit purposes. But if I worked 45 hr one week and 35 the next, we just balanced it to 40 each week, because that makes things easier (and work didn’t care, we just had to show that the collaborators were getting the FTEs they were paying for).

    3. OaDC*

      I’ve never had this experience. I’ve never had to track my hours as a salaried exempt employee, and a reasonable amount of flexibility is the trade off for frequent weeks that are longer than 40 hours. Reasonable would generally mean less than 4 hours. If I took off at three on a slow Friday that would be fine and if I took off at noon I would take a half day of PTO.

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        Same. Our standard policy for exempt folk (who are generally assumed to work 8 hour days M-F) is that PTO can only be taken in 4-hour increments and if you work at least 5 hours in a particular day, no PTO is required to make up the rest. (I, and everyone else I know, has always understood that to be an occasional thing for appointments and such to be handled between you and your manager, not blanket permission to routinely work only 5 hours a day.)

      2. Nancy*

        That has been the policy at every salaried job I had as well.

        Our PTO is not used unless you take at least 4 hours off.. So in OP’s case, they would need to use PTO.

    4. ecnaseener*

      FWIW, it’s a mix in my experience. At my last job my manager occasionally said to “just make up the time” for partial-day absences but she didn’t usually bring it up for an appointment here or there. At my current job, there’s absolutely none of that and no mention of counting up your hours. You attend meetings and get your work done.

    5. Cat Lady in the Mountains*

      yeah, this is precisely why you have medical leave. At my job we allow people to use medical leave in increments as small as 30 minutes, so in this case if you start at 9 and leave at 10, you’d use 7 hours of leave for an 8-hour day. On the manager side I’d never nickel and dime someone for their hours not matching exactly 40 – if you’d left at 4, it wouldn’t even be on my radar – but a missed 7 hours would almost certainly impact deliverables unless your workload is unusually light. And it’s fine for deliverables to be impacted for medical reasons – but that’s what your leave is designed to cover.

      Because the thing is, companies decide on leave packages in part based on how much missed work time the role can afford. If the goals for the position can be met with someone having 15 medical leave days and 20 vacation days a year, and you take 16 medical leave days and 20 vacation days, now we have less capacity than we designed the role around. (And, this requires actually giving people a reasonable amount of leave – if you’re only getting like 15 combined PTO days a year that’s unrealistic on the employer’s end.)

    6. Texan in Exile*

      Yeah, that’s the part that bothers me so much. LW says, “I have the luxury of working a few hours beyond the weekly 40 when inspiration strikes.”

      So the extra hours don’t accrue to LW’s benefit? If you want me to take PTO for six hours, even when I have worked past 40 hours before without extra pay, then I will not work a second past 40 hours a week.

      1. doreen*

        I’m not sure that’s a fair assumption that extra hours don’t give any benefit to the LW – the letter says the manager asked if the LW wanted to take PTO or if they would be making it up. A job that allows making it up might account for time the way a job of mine used to – I had to work 150 hours in the four week period covered by my timesheet but I could work 37.5 each week , or 47.5 week 1 and 27.5 week 2 etc. so that I really never had to work any extra hours.

    7. Mockingjay*

      A lot depends on how your company calculates pay periods and housekeeping rules about timecards. My company tracks 40 hours per week, from Saturday to Friday. Management is extremely flexible about making up hours, as long as 40 are recorded within that same week. But it means you can’t use the weekend. There are several reasons: we are on fixed fee contracts so OT funds are saved for onsite technical work and travel, also to encourage work life balance.

      We have PTO (any use), it increases each year, but it’s not that adequate when you first start with the company. A couple years ago they began fronting new hires with 40 hours, which really helps.

    8. MigraineMonth*

      My exempt job expects a minimum of 80 hours per 2-week pay period. For a while they were also pushing a lot of overtime, until our union stepped in and negotiated overtime pay for us at pay-and-a-half. Now those deadlines aren’t as urgent as they thought they were and the job expects us to work *exactly* 80 hours per 2-week pay period.

    9. Also-ADHD*

      I’ve never had a salaried job that tracked hours.

      I’ve had hourly, salaried, and a weird union-contract (NOT salaried, but no OT) situation in my life. But the jobs I’ve had that are salaried (including current) were truly salaried. I did a job and was relatively available during work hours, and they paid me a salary. There are sometimes expectations of core hours to a degree, but flexibility worked both ways. And when we have had a big crunch (true of at least 3 jobs, including my current) that requires any overtime of note (certainly well before 70!), I can take similar time back in future, if it doesn’t happen naturally.

      1. Also-ADHD*

        Oh, just to be clear, even in these cases, I might have to take PTO (last 2 jobs had unlimited for my role, and I didn’t put in PTO, just mark myself OoO and notified manager, as the general process). I’m not arguing that, so much as this notion that we should “expect” to work over 40 as salaried but must always hit 40. That’s a crappy company thing, not the standard in my experience. That’s also the kind of thing people do with jobs that really shouldn’t be labeled salaried.

  5. Ellis Bell*

    OP3’s colleague must be really dedicated to gossip if she’s willing to make someone feel paranoid about the frequency of their medical appointments as a very transparent bait. I particularly liked the forced teaming element of this message. I take OP’s word that this colleague otherwise likeable, but she has a problem; where gossip is concerned, she’ll go quite a way to get it. I can’t think of anything more likely to drive her nuts, than to ignore the message completely, it also sends a message that the bait is not tempting and fools no one. She’ll probably switch to digging for dirt in person and this is where you just respond with grey rocking, and pretending to believe anything useful; “Oh, I know that you wouldn’t pry! Anyway, nothing to report.” But if she says anything about your time off, don’t justify yourself and if you can’t ignore it, put it back on her plate to explain “I don’t think you have that right. What makes you think that?”

      1. xylocopa*

        I dunno, that seems like she’d take it as fuel– Ooooooh, there’s something to Not Pry about after all!

        1. Ally McBeal*

          Agree. I think that communicates everything LW3 wants to convey without feeding their coworker even a tiny nibble of private medical information. I think Miss Manners would be delighted with that standalone sentence.

        2. Mutually Supportive*

          I think that could also be misunderstood to mean that there is something to Not Pry about.

          Is this the type of messaging service where you can just press and hold the message to leave a thumbs up emoji? If so, I’d do that. Acknowledges the message, and gives precisely zero information! Probably infuriating to receive in this context, so that’s a bonus too.

          1. MsM*

            I like that, too! (And you can still just send an emoji as a reply, even if it’s not a reaction.)

          2. xylocopa*

            Yeah, I definitely feel like “thank you for not prying” risks coming across as “thank you for not prying about my sensitive private issue.” Bring on more thoughts-and-prayers for your Secret Illness. But OF COURSE she doesn’t want to pry, she just knows this is a Tough Time for you, etc etc.

            I like the thumbs-up, yes. Or just “Thanks, I’m fine.” Or honestly just…not answering.

          3. Emily Byrd Starr*

            Absolutely. I would definitely include “I’m fine,” for the reason you just said. It seems to me that the coworker means well, but has trouble understanding boundaries.

    2. I.T. Phone Home*

      Thinking about “driving her nuts” or “putting it back on her plate” is still so much more involved than I’d want to be.

      1. KateM*

        Driving her nuts by ignoring her message (i.e by not doing anything) doesn’t seem that much involved to me.

        1. I.T. Phone Home*

          I take OP’s word that this colleague otherwise likeable, but she has a problem; where gossip is concerned, she’ll go quite a way to get it. I can’t think of anything more likely to drive her nuts, than to ignore the message completely, it also sends a message that the bait is not tempting and fools no one.

          I think not engaging with or contributing to gossip is great advice. Thinking that your coworker “has a problem” and that your strategy is going to “drive her nuts” and “send a message” doesn’t strike me as any better than being the office gossip though.

    3. Not on board*

      Yes, grey rocking is the way to go.

      Or you can have fun with it and when she pries, make vague statements that hint at specific things and let her imagination run wild. I’d be curious to see where she goes with it.

      1. SprawledOut*

        Not going to lie, I’d be a little tempted to start reporting symptoms of something that very obviously can’t be right. Perhaps a mild fever, some excess salivation, followed in a few days by an intense urge to drink water but “every time I try it just makes me cough and I can’t get anything down, so strange!”

        I wouldn’t recommend that as a strategy, of course, but I’d be awfully tempted…

      2. Ellis Bell*

        See, I get tempted to have fun as well, so I totally understand this. People are just fascinating.

    4. Yankees fans are awesome!*

      In my experience, Nosy Nellies furiously dig because something might be there! It’s GOT to be, and they’ll dig and dig and dig…

      Because they can’t handle it when there is no “there” there. I like how you’re handling it, LW.

  6. supply closet badger*

    A former boss of mine did something kind of similar to LW1’s boss but handled it much worse (to the point it *was* inappropriate, IMO), so maybe a comparison will be illustrative for your friend:

    My boss: Snarked in an all-hands meeting about how he’d expected to see more of us at a recent march*
    LW boss: Calmly (?) informed and encouraged staff to attend if feasible, without the implication that he was keeping tabs on who went and would judge them for it

    My boss: Subject of the march, while important, was not (or extremely tangentially) related to our work
    LW boss: Can point to a direct and near-immediate connection between employees’ ability to do and keep their jobs and the subject of the march

    My boss: Proceeded to take up more meeting time with his commentary about specific speeches, etc.
    LW boss: Didn’t get into the weeds of what you might call a political discussion (by the sounds of the letter)

    I hope this shows that there can be an appropriate and an inappropriate way to engage with staff on this sort of matter.

    *There were a couple of thousand people at this thing, so could it be he just hadn’t spotted us in the crowd, perchance … ?

    2. Sara without an H*

      Well said. I thought it was also appropriate for LW’s boss to give explicit information about the hospital’s required behavior for participants, i.e. not identifying themselves as employees of the hospital nor appearing to speak on its behalf. Given that the event was already public and that at least some of LW’s coworkers would be interested in attending, getting out front with that information was a good idea.

      1. Annony*

        I agree. I think even if the protest was completely unrelated to their jobs, it would be appropriate for the boss to give a general reminder of the policies so that they don’t accidentally violate them.

      2. Elsewise*

        I agree! I work for a nonprofit that gets pretty political sometimes, and our staff are very politically engaged and tend to be pretty broadly aligned. We often get emails or announcements like this around big marches because leadership is operating on the assumption that at least some of us are probably going, and we should be reminded that we’re not officially representing the organization.

    3. Observer*

      This is an excellent list.

      Can point to a direct and near-immediate connection between employees’ ability to do and keep their jobs and the subject of the march

      This is *especially* relevant.

      The issue at hand is not about where you land on Trump, MAGA, DOGE or anything else. The issue at hand is laws / regulations that are *directly* linked to the core of your institutions work. Which means that it doesn’t even really matter if it’s “political”.

      To take a totally deliberately fantastical example – You company makes chocolate and candy teapots. Congress starts making noises about passing laws that would ban most kinds of chocolate and candy teapots. Would it be “too political” for the boss to tell people that “Our Congress people are A, B, and C. And that Rep. ChocolateHater is the moving force behind this possible bill. This is how you can reach them / their offices to express your opinions. It’s probably a good idea that people let them know that you consider this a bad idea.”

      1. DancinProf*

        My employer (very apolitical and very conflict-averse) has done almost exactly what you describe in response to a recent legislative proposal that could seriously compromise our ability to continue serving our clients. They sent out communications explaining the issue and telling employees whom to contact and how if they want to speak out on the matter. No one that I’m aware of has considered these communications “too political.”

      2. MigraineMonth*

        I know I voted for Rep ChocolateHater’s opponent, I have no idea how they got elected.

    4. LW1*

      These are really good points! Your interpretations are correct, this was not pushy or demanding. Frankly, it is difficult for most of us to leave the hospital in the middle of the day on a Friday, I just happened to get lucky with my schedule, so there is really no expectation, he just wanted us to be aware.

      Admittedly, my friend and I generally disagree about politics and while he may not like the NIH funding changes, he is generally more supportive of this administration, so is less likely to want to protest at all and may have been concerned about other people who feel the same way, but may feel like they need to hide their perspectives.

      I will say that being involved in advocacy is very common in medicine and is generally done in an issue based, bipartisan way. The professional organizations to which I belong frequently facilitate email blasts to senators and representatives on issues related to medicine and organize advocacy Hill days in which we go to speak with our senators and representatives (really generally just their staff) in their offices in DC.

      1. Observer*

        Admittedly, my friend and I generally disagree about politics and while he may not like the NIH funding changes, he is generally more supportive of this administration, so is less likely to want to protest at all and may have been concerned about other people who feel the same way, but may feel like they need to hide their perspectives.

        The thing is that nothing you describe should be of concern to someone like this. Nothing your manager said indicates that anyone is keeping track.

  7. Nodramalama*

    Is lw5 some kind of American specific thing, because I’m pretty confused that anyone would expect to not work 90% of the work day, and not take leave for that time.

    1. Happy meal with extra happy*

      Nope, it’s just an uncertain person writing to Alison with a question. Any exempt job I’ve ever had, I would need to use PTO for that.

    2. bamcheeks*

      In the UK if you come in and then go home later because you’re ill it’s not usually counted as an absence. But if it was, it would be sick leave, not annual leave, and they’re quite different.

      Also, if you regularly work significantly over 40 hours a week, then I do think the same grace should be extended in the opposite direction. But it’s clearly grace rather than a legal right.

      1. Wolf*

        In such situations, I’m very glad that in my country, it is a legal right. Your work hours are registered, and there is a clear number of plus or minus hours. No guessing or negotiating.

        1. bamcheeks*

          It’s a legal right in the UK too, but there are certain sectors where it’s widely flouted, including some public sector and unioned roles like healthcare. Employers aren’t required to track hours in the same way they are for non-salaried workers in the US, so if you work longer hours and your employer doesn’t have a formal or informal TOIL system to return those hours to you, it’s very difficult to get redress. But it is a minority of sectors which work that way and most of them are highly competitive, which means that it’s much harder for unions to push back.

    3. Michigander*

      I suppose one difference is that in the US you have much more limited leave. I’m in the UK and if I work part of the day and then go home sick I don’t need to take sick leave, but it wouldn’t really matter to me if I needed to, since I don’t have a limited bank of sick leave. Taking a sick day now doesn’t mean I have one fewer sick day to take later. I can see being annoyed at taking sick leave in America because you only have 10 days a year allotted to you for being sick (though I agree with you that 10 am is too early to finish for the day and not expect to use any leave time).

      1. Varthema*

        Yep, and it’s also the practice of putting all paid time off (sick and annual leave) into one (very small) bucket. I really don’t get why people are okay with this; even if some years you don’t get sick and can take extra time off at Christmas, another year a bad bout of the flu could totally wipe out your ability to recharge all year and that’s not okay.

        IMO the only reasonable approach is unlimited sick days (with some kind of extra communication/agreement in place for extended or repeated time off) so that people aren’t forced to ration out their health on the one hand, but also not looking for excuses to “use it up” on the other. Anyway that’s how it should work for jobs that are based on outcomes and deliverables rather than coverage; the need for coverage does make this more complex for sure.

        1. DJ Abbott*

          I would like to have all my PTO in one bucket because two years in a row I’ve been sick in January and had to use vacation time to cover the days. My employer credits all the vacation time for the year at the beginning of the year, but sick time accrues at a rate of one day per month, so I only had two days left over from the previous year. As long as the PTO works out to the same number of days I would got having them separate, I would like it better.
          But I agree, unlimited sick days would be much better!

          1. londonedit*

            Yes; the key part of how it works in the UK is also that you don’t have to accrue sick time (which also just seems like a ridiculous way of doing things, because as you say you might well be ill in January!). The idea of having to use holiday time to cover sick leave just isn’t a thing here. Of course we still have companies that are bad about sick leave and that punish employees who take ‘too much’ time off, but still your annual leave is your annual leave and sick time is completely different. I can’t fathom the idea of not wanting to take holiday because you might get ill. Here you’re encouraged to use your legally required annual leave allowance and if you’re ill then that’s a completely different process that has nothing to do with holiday.

        2. I should really pick a name*

          I really don’t get why people are okay with this

          Being okay with it really isn’t a factor. It’s not like you can change how your job handles time off.

          Also, separating time off into buckets makes more sense, but for someone like me who doesn’t get sick often, a single pool is great.

          1. Hush42*

            This, it depends on your job and your lifestyle. My company switched to all one bucket a couple of years ago and for me I definitely prefer it, mostly because it gave me significantly more time off. I wasn’t getting sick very often so my sick time was just sitting there. When they combined it all into one bucket I was basically then granted access to 2 more weeks of PTO. However, I am aware that there are some people for whom this might not be a clear benefit- I am single, don’t have any children (human vectors for illness), and my job allows me to WFH when I am sick. I did get the flu this year but ended up only needing to take a day and a half off since I got sick on the weekend and then WFH the rest of the week.

          2. Kiriana*

            And conversely I often accrued a big bank of vacation time while using all my sick days. There was no risk of losing out on money for not using vacation time since the law is that you get paid out the equivalent of what you have left in your final paycheck so I wasn’t super diligent about using it all. But when I got really sick and was in and out of hospital my workplace did bend the rules (with my permission!) to back-approve vacation time so I’d still get paid, normally we had to book vacation time two weeks in advance. I’m not sure what they would have done if I didn’t have any vacation time either but when they weren’t sure whether they’d get any government funding to pay staff who couldn’t work during covid lockdowns they were still promising they’d find a way to pay us 80% of our using pay so I suspect they’d have come up with something.

            1. Melody Powers*

              I’ve often had to dip into vacation days after running out of sick days which is why I get a little tired of the simplification I see all the time here that two buckets is always better for those of us with chronic illnesses. I found it simpler to have one bucket and less demoralizing to not have to convert days that were explicitly meant to be for vacation to sick days.

        3. AlsoADHD*

          I know some people hate Unlimited (because it can be problematic at places where people don’t take their time, though both places I’ve worked with Unlimited had required minimums, just no max—yes, it’s not truly limitless if you go crazy with it but it’s been more than reasonable by US standards at both places and no nickel and diming). But this is one benefit I’ve had with unlimited is I take at least 20 days planned vacation plus any sick time I need (might take less planned vacation on a year where I had to take a long leave for medical reasons etc. but for normal medical needs, I just don’t even think about them). That’s not even counting holidays or an end of year (Xmas to NY) shut down.

          Before I had Unlimited, I had decent PTO with buckets and it was frustrating with sick time left on the table or not having enough. But it’s very nice to just be trusted to do my job and not punch a clock. Granted, I feel like there are jobs where you want credit for all your hours but I would hate to be hourly and have to deal with that. It always made me feel awful clocking in or minding a clock.

          I think the UK does separate buckets and no penalties for sick leave, but I’ve never seen that in the US except for salaried and unlimited. Never in a bucket system.

        4. Yorick*

          In the US, every company does this differently. I have separate sick and vacation time. Sick time does accrue but doesn’t expire. I’ve been here 8 years so I have about 3 months of sick time saved up. It’s nice for them to be separate so using a sick day doesn’t take away a vacation day, but on the other hand it would be cool if they were together so I’d have more vacation time each year.

      2. Bast*

        Having 10 days of sick leave is not the experience for all Americans, and would have been considered generous in most of the places I have worked, where if there was designated sick leave, was typically 3-5 days. In others there was no designated sick leave, you just took from your PTO bank, which was typically 15 days per year. It can vary greatly. I only say this because I know in some countries the amount of guaranteed sick leave is set and universal, but no such system exists in the US.

    4. Seeking Second Childhood*

      I do wish that OP had specified what time they start. Some IT departments are staffed extended hours to support other time zones.

      In my (non-IT) job I was at one point working 6:00 am – 2:30 pm, so 10 am would have been a half day. We could take sick time in increments down to 1 hour.

    5. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      No, it’s just this guy. I can see not taking sick leave for an hour or two if you’re salaried, but he basically took the whole day. He clearly needs to take the sick day.

    6. Parenthesis Guy*

      He’s slightly confused. In the US, there are laws saying that if an exempt employee works part of a week that they paid for the full week. Exempt employees aren’t eligible for overtime, so it’s only fair that they get paid their full amount if they’re doing any work.

      The problem is that there are no laws mandating PTO in the US. So, any PTO offered is considered almost like a gift or a perk from the company to the employee. As such, rules forcing people to take PTO are generally allowed because PTO isn’t something that they’re entitled to.

      But if the employee didn’t get PTO, they’d still have to be paid for that time, even if they took two full days off and didn’t make up the hours. Whether their employer would fire them if they made it a habit is a different question.

    7. Ann Onymous*

      It really depends on the employer and the specific job function whether they expect 40 hours per week or 8 hours per day. I’m salaried exempt in the US and as long as I get to 40 hours by the end of the week, I can work more on some days and less on others without using any PTO (with the caveat that I’m getting my work done and letting my team know when I’ll be out of office). It’s really common in my office for people to work extra hours Mon-Thurs and leave early on Friday.

    8. Lenora Rose*

      I think it depends what they mean by “I have the luxury of working a few hours beyond the weekly 40 when inspiration strikes.”

      if that means they’ve been working several 50 hours weeks without a peep but are now being dinged for one incident of a 33-hour week, then yes, there’s an element of “Surely all my overtime should count for something”.

      If on the other hand they’ve been flexing their time but always averaged out to 40 hours a week, then it’s just a clarifying question. (It also might be the case they can only take the PTO as a full day block, in which case they either should be allowed to make up the hour or 2 they did work by going home early without PTO another time, or they are losing a couple of hours of time off).

    9. LuckyDuck*

      Our payroll system doesn’t allow exempt employees to take partial day PTO. If one of my exempt employees worked 3 hours and started feeling bad, I would not ask them to put in PTO for that day. A) it would mean they were not getting paid for work they did and B) as exempt employees I know that there are other times they work over time and outside normal working hours (which if they were non-exempt would get them shift differential) and it all evens out. If it was being abused, I would address it with that person.

  8. JM60*

    #5 I think the partial exception is if you live in a state that considers PTO/vacation to be an earned wage (such as California). In that case, they can still require that you use the PTO, but I think they would have to pay you both for cashing out that PTO, and for the (partial) day worked.

    1. Mid*

      Can you explain further? I’m fairly certain you’re incorrect. You are getting paid, by using PTO hours instead of your time at work. So by your explanation, it sounds like someone would be double paid when taking PTO.

      1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        I think JM60 means that, if you leave after 2 hours and are charged a full 8 for the day of PTO, then you’d have to be paid for 10 hours for that day. Alternatively, the business could charge you just 6 hours of PTO for leaving early, leaving the pay at 8 hours for the day.

        1. Dido*

          I’ve never worked somewhere where you couldn’t take a partial day of PTO… the company can’t double dip and require PTO to be used for time spent working

          1. JM60*

            I think this double-dipping is where people get confused with regard to PTO/vacation being treated as wages in some states. I see no legal reason why a company can’t tell you that you have to cash out some PTO/vacation, but that needs to be in addition to what they would have to pay you if that PTO/vacation wasn’t paid out.

            In addition, one of the requirements for being exempt is that “an exempt employee must receive the full salary for any week in which the employee performs any work” (with some specific exemptions).

            Putting the above two together, if an exempt employee is in a jurisdiction that requires PTO/vacation to be treated as earned wages, and they make that employee spend PTO on partial days without paying them more than their full day of wages, then either:

            * They aren’t paid for their “full salary”, in violation of the exempt requirements.

            or

            * They aren’t paid for cashing out the PTO, in violation of the state’s requirement for PTO/vacation to be treated as an earned wage.

    2. AlsoADHD*

      In this case, they’re not requiring the LW to use a full day, just a partial to make up the pay of the day not worked, so I don’t think they are underpaying either. It would be fine in CA law to require LW use a partial day of PTO. You might have trouble with a policy that required he use a full day if he also worked that day is what you mean?

      1. JM60*

        just a partial to make up the pay of the day not worked

        One of the requirements for being exempt is that “an exempt employee must receive the full salary for any week in which the employee performs any work” (with some specific exemptions). If an exempt employee works 6 hours in one day, charged 2 hours PTO, but only paid their normal daily wage, then either:

        * They aren’t paid for their “full salary”, in violation of the exempt requirements.

        or

        * They aren’t paid for cashing out those 2 hours of PTO, in violation of the state’s requirement for PTO/vacation to be treated as an earned wage (if the employee lives in such a state).

        In general, an employer can’t pay for 2 hours of wage and count it as paying for 2 different thing.

  9. Melisande*

    #LW2 in the UK it is illegal to operate without sufficient funds to pay employees, so grant-dependent staffing can very quickly be ended to avoid putting the wider organisation at risk.

    1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      I can understand in the US too that they’d want to cut out asap the groups that are no longer funded, or they’d become a financial drain on the rest of the org and maybe jeopordise even more jobs.

      1. AVP*

        Especially because $2b of the funds in question were for work already completed…so some of these balances are already negative.

    2. M_Lynn*

      the LW is right about WARN, but with the required notice the companies needed to begin the notice ASAP to ensure they have the funds to meet that requirement. In addition, the government is refusing to pay back millions owned for work completed prior to the exec orders, so companies have even less money on hand. this has been documented in all the lawsuits.

      there is nothing conspiratorial happening. this is just the impact of massive government cuts and how federal spending props up so much if the economy. companies cna lay off staff whenever they want, they don’t need to fake AA reasons with this current federal crisis

      1. BatManDan*

        Government spending is a DRAIN on the economy; they had to confiscate that money from SOMEONE, and it’s always the taxpayers. But, it’s safe to say government spending DIRECTS a lot of the economy. But it is inherently not generative; quite the opposite.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I think it would cause a massive inflation problem if the government were “generating” (a.k.a. printing) too much money.

          The government taxes and spends; companies get earnings and spend; citizens earn money and pay taxes and spend. The money’s going round and round, not… draining away somewhere? Unless you mean to savings, which is also a necessary part of the economy to buffer economic shocks and prevent over-extension into debt.

        2. Hiya*

          That’s simply not true, a lot of government spending helps the economy grow and underpins a lot of business practices. Your trucking depends on government-funded roads; your marine shipping depends on government-funded communication, gps satellites, and weather forecasting, your ability to hire competent workers depends on government-funded education to name just a very few.

      2. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

        > In addition, the government is refusing to pay back millions owned for work completed prior to the exec orders

        This is, IIRC, Trump’s MO going back decades. Contract for some work, refuse to pay bills.

        1. Brain the Brian*

          Yep. I can say from looking at our balance sheet this month that we are owed many millions for work completed on the government’s behalf that they are either slow-walking to the extreme or flat-out refusing to reimburse.

  10. Earlk*

    For LW1 management were aware it was a march many employees would be interested in going and needed to tell you that they wouldn’t stop you from going but you absolutely cannot be seen to be representing the company while you’re there. They would’ve included that you were welcome to go because saying you couldn’t is even more political.

    1. Smithy*

      Yes – as someone in a sector/field who gets a lot of these messages – the point is usually far more about not wearing anything to identify the organization/appear as a spokesperson. In a few cases, I’ve even heard messaging about not wearing organization colors.

      On the flip side – when I’ve worked somewhere that is formally participating in a parade, march etc, there’s usually also guidance around that. It’s usually far more around identifying who the media representatives are that day, but still the same basic messaging about who is formally speaking for an organization and when.

  11. Bored*

    LW1. I agree with Alison.

    But Im also wondering, what was the true intention of the announcement?

    Like, was it more about “you SHOULD GO! just dont get identified as a worker” or “feel free to go if you please, but DONT GET IDENTIFIED as workers”

    I think thats two different messages.

    1. LW1*

      I get that, but it really seemed to be more about making sure that we aren’t talking to the press or acting like we are there as representatives of the University Hospital. People much higher up in the food chain are responsible for the public relations issues and press discussions and don’t want us to complicate that.

  12. Whoopsie*

    AI is not a search engine. AI is not a search engine! Generative AI only generates text based on the input prompt and regularly hallucinates information – that’s not a search engine!

    You sound young, OP5, but now you’ve learned two important lessons: salaried exempt still means taking PTO if you can’t make up the hours, and AI is not a search engine.

    1. The Body Is Round*

      Thank you. I don’t understand why people will just “ask an AI” like it has the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

      LW5 and their generation, if they don’t trust Google because it also sucks now (and I agree), should find a better search engine and learn to use operators or just… know what the websites are where laws can be found, and go directly there. You don’t need to go through a search engine to get to a website. You don’t need to use the library catalogue if you know where the book is.

    2. DJ Abbott*

      I can see why people would refer to it like that, though. When you Google something, the first results come up prominently marked AI and they sound reasonable and comprehensive, as if AI actually had information and knew what it was doing. I still usually forget to put “-ai” at the end of my search string, and have to start over.
      It would be easy to forget AI is not the search engine.
      When I was young, most of us knew how to use quotes and boolean operators to refine the search. Within a few years, that functionality went away and no one was doing it. As the machines do more of the work people do less and forget, or are never taught, how to do it.

      1. bamcheeks*

        The ones I find most frustrating are when it IS right, because it has just pulled a chunk of text from the relevant law, government website or professional website etc, and then added tiny changes that may be immaterial to the meaning of may totally reverse it. It’s such a miserable enshittification compared to LINKING TO THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE.

      2. Antilles*

        When you Google something, the first results come up prominently marked AI and they sound reasonable and comprehensive, as if AI actually had information and knew what it was doing.
        Which is honestly more dangerous than if the AI was completely off-base and sounded bonkers, because by definition, the person who has to Google something doesn’t know the answer. So you don’t have the knowledge base to recognize an answer that’s plausible-but-wrong or an answer that’s mostly correct but missing one key step.
        Frankly, I think OP should be praised for the instinct to back-check the AI result with a knowledgeable human, rather than blindly accepting the AI’s response no questions asked.

        2. bamcheeks*

          Especially if what you’re looking up is something like a legal or policy question. It is SO easy for the entire meaning to be reversed by a change from “from” to “to” or from “in” to “at”, and everything to still look perfectly normal and plausible!

    3. Hobbling Up A Hill*

      I want to scream just a little bit every time someone says they’ve done that. I saw someone say ‘I asked ChatGPT to do some deep background for me’ and I quite literally facepalmed. AI is not a search engine, nor can it understand the concept of ‘deep background’.

      1. Morgan*

        “I asked my weird buddy Steve, who’s read the entire Library of Congress, but has no common sense and can’t separate fact from fiction.”

    4. Katie A*

      Wait, how did they learn that from this experience? I agree that AI isn’t a search engine, but the AI got it right in this case.

      Extrapolating from a single experience is limited, but you seem to be suggesting they should do that here. However, if they do that, it seems like the takeaway would be that AI correctly answers their questions and therefore fulfills the function of a search engine in this instance.

      1. Dinwar*

        “…the AI got it right in this case.”

        To quote Stauf, even a blind pig can find a truffle once in a while.

        I’ve seen results from LLMs in my area of expertise that were ridiculously off-base. The problem, however, is that they sound plausible. The post-hoc adjustments–what we call “fudge factors” in research, and what “AI” folks call “training”–are designed to produce plausible-sounding text. This means you have to have a fair amount of background knowledge to understand when LLMs go off the rails.

        The problem itself isn’t anything terribly new. Ancient historians have been dealing with this for generations. Take Plutarch. Until archaeology started providing enough data to look at culture through its lens, Plutarch was all we had. And he’s plausible. He SOUNDS accurate (for the most part). But when you look at the archaeological record, he’s laughably wrong about nearly everything (because he wasn’t dealing with history, he was commenting on his culture, but that’s a side issue). Conspiracy theories also follow this pattern: they are designed to sound plausible, but ultimately are complete nonsense.

        LLMs complicate this because we’re so used to computers providing accurate information. Remember when GPS navigation first came out? The number of people who drove into lakes or buildings because “The GPS said so”? We’ve all known people who think “Google said so, so it must be true!” (I actually had a reverse of this–I know someone who refused to believe that castoreum comes from beaver anal glands, because I used a Google search–of research papers–to provide evidence.) Google wasn’t designed to sound plausible, merely to provide easier access than other alternatives, and yet we have people who refuse to believe it could possibly be wrong. Combine that with the plausibility of LLM responses, and things get bad.

        You see this in the fiber arts world. People just getting in see these wonderful “AI”-generated images of crochet projects, then get super frustrated because they can’t make them work. Of course they can’t; these designs CAN’T work. It’s like building a house out of ant teeth. But it LOOKS plausible, so people assume it is.

    5. juliebulie*

      I specifically wanted to ask, why would you use an AI when you can use a search engine for a fairly simple question.

      I don’t know the environmental impact of using a basic search engine, but it’s gotta be better than an AI.

      On the other hand, search engines are using AI anyway so… maybe it doesn’t matter. But it still seems like using an anvil to kill a fly.

  13. In the DMV*

    LW 2 – for organizations largely funded by the U.S. government, many don’t have cash on hand for payroll since the current changes end contract and payments. Many nonprofits don’t have the cash reserves to stay operational without money coming in. While many nonprofits are preparing for a future where the organization can sustain this, many are simply unable to float this period of time.

    1. Smithy*

      Yeah – also a lot of these grants are structured where payments are done on arrears. So the payment comes after the work is completed.

      This is most common with government contracts (of which some nonprofits had along with for profit contractors), but the system for grants can still have a period where work is being done that is not yet paid for. Therefore a lot of these rapid firings are being done because not only will the future funding not be coming in, but depending on the risk exposure of an organization, they’ve also not been paid for work completed during the last quarter of 2024.

      All to say, this absolutely exacerbated the cash crunch.

      1. SnowRose*

        In addition to this, many nonprofits are still recovering from COVID. A lot of nonprofits didn’t survive, and of those that did, many still haven’t recovered financially.

        For context, COVID’s impact to our FY20 and FY21 budgets was roughly 35%. Fortunately, our executive leadership and Board of Directors are pretty strategic and had already made prior moves to diversify our revenue streams instead of relying primarily on federal grants, and we were able to support our grant-funded staff through other means. We didn’t lay any one off due to financial reasons, but it was a big impact to those reserve funds and we’ve only just built them back up.

        1. Smithy*

          I’d also say that on the flip side – there were also international NGO’s – particularly large ones and those in healthcare – that actually saw increased government support over the first Trump administration as well as increased funding during COVID. And so they’ve been proactively growing their programming, staffing, etc. over the past 8 years.

          In those growth cases, they are now facing whiplash to now be sent to a radically different projections landscape. Even those who were planning cautiously over 2024. One of the contracts that Trump has specifically called out now as being wasteful was a contract that was not only was made during his first administration but he also spoke about it personally at the time.

          All to say, entities that had been engaging in reasonable and thoughtful budget planning just really ended up facing a situation that would have been wildly doomsday to plan for in 2024.

  14. Anon Fed Contractor*

    #2–yes, layoffs are definitely happening that quickly. My organization had a large amount of work with USAID and the Department of Education—those contracts were cancelled with no notice and little to no hope of them being reinstated. We do not have the cash flow to be able to continue to keep all those staff on. We’ve already had two rounds of layoffs and I expect there will be more as the disruption continues.

    1. LaminarFlow*

      I am so sorry. I have nothing to offer here beyond the platitudes of sending love & light/thoughts & prayers style phrases that can be purchased on mugs at HomeGoods. I am just incredibly sorry, embarrassed to be an American, and I stand with you and your counterparts at USAID and the Dept of Education. Your work is very important, and IDK how bad things are going to get from here, but I am scared.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        If you’re an American, as you say you are, there is more you can do – call your members of Congress! (If you call after hours Eastern time you’ll get voicemail and not have to talk to a person, if that’s helpful to you.)

        1. Texan in Exile*

          And call every day. Every day. They need to feel the heat.

          (And if you are able – lend your body to protests. Volunteer for a candidate who supports your views, even down to the city council and school board level. There are elections on April 1 in many places.)

        2. MCL*

          There’s an app called 5calls that is helpful for giving a script. I have only gotten through to a live human when calling my congressional rep. The senators in my state (WI) are typically voicemails only, and it’s helpful for me to have a script before timeout!

          1. Texan in Exile*

            I have the numbers for all the WI R delegation entered into my phone as “Politician First Name Last Name” and I just go through the list every day.

            (And I call Tammy and Gwen occasionally to encourage them to stick to their guns.)

    2. another anon fed*

      It’s more than just contracts being cancelled with no notice. At least for USAID, partners are not even being paid for work they did before the stop work order! Many USAID contracts are on a reimbursement basis, meaning the contractor/partner fronts the money and then submits a detailed invoice to be reimbursed. Normally (in the before-times), it’s a well-oiled machine where invoices are reviewed, approved, and paid promptly (plus also audited later, as yet another step to prevent fraud). When all of this shuts off suddenly, as it did with the foreign aid freeze, contractors are out literally millions of dollars that the government owes them for work they already completed.

      Currently, there’s a court case brought by several USAID contractors. A judge issued a temporary restraining order essentially trying to make the government pay their contractual obligations, and DOGE whined to the Supreme Court that it’s impossible to do in the timeline given. (Yeah, maybe if you didn’t fire all of the employees and freeze the payment system, it would be possible!) Yesterday the Supreme Court denied the government’s request, but shockingly four of the five justices wrote a dissent that basically says the government can just refuse to pay its bills and that taxpayers would be “wrongly out” that money… which is for work already completed. It’s truly bonkers – basically the government equivalent of if I wake up tomorrow and decide I changed my mind and therefore don’t have to pay my kitchen contractors for remodeling work they already did, under a contract I had signed – since I changed my mind I can just refuse to pay them.

      But yes, suddenly not getting millions of dollars of payments for work you already completed means many organizations/companies are facing bankruptcy and unable to continue paying their employees, leading to quick layoffs.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        That’s certainly Trump’s business model. He’s stiffed everyone from a piano seller to the guy who installed his gold toilets, if I recall. Why not move on to the entire world?

      2. Brain the Brian*

        Your analogy about kitchen contracting work is spot-on. From the contractor / grantee side of foreign assistance, we are in a very tough spot right now. If we survive, I have my doubts that we’ll ever apply for another USG contract or grant. Why would we, since the government has demonstrated that they don’t want to bother paying us?

    3. MigraineMonth*

      Thank you for all the important work you’ve done and I hope you will be able to do again in the future. I’m so sorry.

  15. Still have job but most of my friend’s don’t*

    Also, for LW#1 for foreign assistance the Executive Orders immediately stopped paying bills including for work that had been completed. For a lot of these companies say they performed work in November billed it out at 30 days in December, and would have expected to be paid at the end of January. Similar chain for December. This work has been done, the staff has been paid,, and a lot of companies don’t have the liquidity to carry people for very long. Several of the lawsuits are around this. Also, for what it is worth, there are federally mandated penalties for paying bills late, so the US government is racking up interest penalties that are going to cost an enormous amount of money.

    2. Inflatable Unicorn*

      This work has been done, the staff has been paid,, and a lot of companies don’t have the liquidity to carry people for very long.

      This is something that I don’t think has really sunk into the general American consciousness yet, and I fear the moment it does. Right now the US is coasting on savings and the promise of restored funding and/or the promise of successful lawsuits. Everything still *seems* more or less normal and functional.

      But Cutting off All The Money and forcing use of savings now means companies and individuals won’t have that cushion to help them weather any *other* trouble, be it a government shutdown or the 90 days DOGE says it will take to assess funding, much less an extended bad economy.

      90 days – three whole months – is a long time. The cynic in me wonders if DOGE announced that length of shutoff just to force companies into bankruptcy so DOGE could claim they “saved” the funding that would have gone to them.

      1. Kivrin*

        This is why I, as a Canadian, am shocked at the idea that in the other letter that you should “separate politics from work.” Every single job in North America right now is being affected or going to be deeply affected by politics. Pretending it’s not is like saying you should go about your business and ignore the smoke detectors blaring and smoke seeping under the doors.

        1. Cyborg Llama*

          It is a soapbox issue for me the way Americans have been led to certain beliefs about politics, particularly that it is divorced from people’s actual lives and is more of a sorting event.

          Also not for nothing, in the government, the Hatch Act prohibits partisan politics, which means explicitly “vote for the jackals eating peoples faces party!” or view for Candidate X. It does not prohibit discussion of political issues.

      2. Cyborg Llama*

        Bankruptcy doesn’t mean the government doesn’t have to pay the bankrupt party. Part of bankruptcy is collecting everything owed to the debtor to pay the people the debtor owes.

        1. Inflatable Unicorn*

          In theory, yes, but do you have faith that those rules will be followed? By a government that is already breaking rules and agreements right and left?

          1. AVP*

            At the very least, if you’re running an NGO or a business, you simply cannot trust that you’ll ever see a dime, and you need to manage your staff and projects accordingly.

      3. fhqwhgads*

        It’s also shocking to me that we’re only 5 years from pandemic-induced-shutdown that made a TON of businesses close because they couldn’t float the extended “this industry cannot operate right now”…and yet any of the people cool with all the “pull the funding whether it’s legal or not, see what happens” are NOT expecting to see more of what happened in 2020. The reason’s different, but either way, company doesn’t have the funds to just pay everyone for 3 or 6 or 9 or 12 months, company’s gonna go under.

  16. the Viking Diva*

    Great to see the response to OP1 in time for others to take part – US rally sites listed at stand up for science 2025 dot org

    1. Nonprofit writer*

      Thank you for this info, Viking Diva!

      OP1, you are totally right & I will be marching with you! (Either in spirit or in person, I need to see where the marches are.)

      Signed, a non scientist who loves science (and who is alive thanks to cancer research)

    2. Dante's Disco Inferno*

      In our research center, the discussion about the march came up organically. I cancelled our Friday research meeting with a note that many of us had obligations at the capital. We are meeting today to discuss signs and talking points. Our ability to work (for the common good!) is directly impacted. Hope to see many of you there!

    3. Texan in Exile*

      And if there’s not a science rally near you, check to see if Veterans for Peace is having a VA rally. That’s what I will be doing tomorrow afternoon.

    4. Bitter*

      I’m sure that these rallys will be inspiring, energizing, validating. It’s a pity that folks didn’t do this before November ’24 *when in might have made a bleeping difference*

  17. Bonkers*

    Does the WARN Act not apply to the federal government? My husband was purged on Monday with no notice and no severance, as far as we know so far.

    I’d be shocked, just shocked, if this administration were disregarding applicable laws. /s

    1. Hlao-roo*

      The “Worker’s Guide” to the WARN Act from the Department of Labor website says employees not covered by the WARN Act include “Regular federal, state, or local government employees.”

      I will link to the pdf in a reply. The “EMPLOYEES NOT PROTECTED BY WARN” section is on page 7 of the pdf.

      1. Bonkers*

        Fair enough! I guess it’s just the various statutes governing the termination of probationary employees that are currently being violated. And soon enough, the various statutes on broader reductions in force.

    2. Enough*

      Unfortunately many of the laws passed apply only to private companies and not to government entities. And I doubt this is an exception.

    3. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      I actually wondered that too and came to see if anyone had mentioned it, but it occurred to me that the government tends to exempt itself from its own rules on a pretty regular basis :(

    4. Sneaky Squirrel*

      It doesn’t. And for private agencies affected by the government ending its contracts, the WARN act allows for exceptions for “unforeseeable business circumstances”. Many of the contract agencies will try to lay off under that exception.

    5. WarnNotApplicable*

      For what it’s worth, I’ve been laid off from full time jobs six times (and had contracts terminated early another three times) and I’ve only qualified for the WARN Act once. For one thing, many companies do rolling rounds of layoffs and each individual layoff is under the thresholds in the law. For another, there are lots of exceptions when it isn’t required. Most of my layoffs were effective immediately.

    6. Pescadero*

      The WARN Act doesn’t apply to federal, state, or local governments that provide public services, or Indian tribal governments.

    1. Bast*

      Googling in general without understanding the context leads to trouble, and I can see AI being worse. We had an office manager at Old Job who would try to police the attorneys and staff with laws that she had Googled but hadn’t bothered to understand the context. She’d call a meeting upset, “I don’t understand why we aren’t doing ABC when negotiating. The ABC Statute indicates a claim must be acknowledged and a counter offer made within 30 days, so it’s completely unacceptable that this isn’t happening and we need to change policies so that attorneys are following up on the 31st day and filing a motion” etc etc (just made that one up off the top of my head. Welp, we aren’t doing that because that’s a Random State We Don’t Practice In Statute, and isn’t applicable for State We Are In. Also, it’s referencing cases that have been put into suit, and 95% of our cases are in pre-suit, so there are NO motions to be filed at that point in a case. This would happen every few months because she’d Google something and decided we needed to “optimize” a process.

  20. Hyaline*

    Re #1: I feel like line on politics at work when it comes to informing employees about marches, protests, petitions, etc related to work doesn’t really change unless the manager is pressuring employees to participate–giving signals that favoritism will be applied to your actions, or expectations or department wide plans to participate regardless of individual beliefs or how safe they feel participating. We’ve had multiple state and campus level policy changes warranting protest in the past few years, and our chairs have always made it very clear that they were sharing for informative purposes and that no one should feel pressured to pitch in–even if they themselves were spearheading the effort.

    1. Qwerty*

      OP’s description includes telling people they “should” go, which is what I find problematic, because statements like this from someone in power carry weight. Obviously we are getting it paraphrased rather than a direct quote, but that’s why it is really important to be very careful on phrasing. The chair should have been more neutral by informing them of the march and reminding employees who plan on attending of company policies like not wearing branded gear, use PTO, etc.

      A good litmus test is how would OP have felt if the chair used this same phrasing for a march or protest that OP was morally opposed to? Does the chair inform them of all industry related protests and encourage them to attend, regardless of which party/political issue it is tied to?

      I’ve been in the situation multiple times where we got messages like this where government funding was in jeopardy which would have caused the company to immediately closed, and I’m quite certain most of the commenters here would have found it inappropriate at the time.

      1. LW1*

        I think that was largely my friend’s concern as well. Advocacy is very common in medicine and is usually issue focused and bipartisan, which is generally how I feel about this march. I would say that we are made aware of major advocacy opportunities, though those are usually through our professional organizations. There was no pressure or expectation, if anything, it would be very difficult for most people who want to participate to be able to get away from the hospital to do it. Its hard for me to imagine an issue that would so directly affect my job/the work of my colleagues that I would be morally opposed to, but I get your point and I’m not sure how I would feel or react.

      2. Hyaline*

        I agree that the framing of “should” is key here–if it’s “this is happening and if you are planning to participate, you should feel free and we support your free speech, here are the parameters” I’m pretty comfortable, whereas “This is happening and you should all be there with bells on but not branded gear” it gets weirder.

  21. Bookworm*

    LW1: I think Alison’s response is on point. This is threatening your ability to work and indirectly threatening lives (you wrote academic but wouldn’t be surprised if it was a direct threat too).

    It’d be a little different if your hospital was openly backing it/promoting it, or you had to speak to the media or post on social media about it, etc. but it sounds like the info you got was pretty standard. If anything, I think your friend doesn’t understand the moment we’re in: you can say you avoid politics, but politics won’t avoid you.

    And many people from marginalized/undeserved communities have never, EVER had that privilege.

    1. LW1*

      Sadly, my friend is actually in the same field I am, but at a different hospital, so he does get it. We generally disagree on politics and he is more supportive of this administration even if he disagrees with this specific issue and I believe was worried about how people who support this administration would have interpreted the chair’s comments. I don’t know anyone in my department that, at least openly, agrees with this administration to know how they felt about it.

      I absolutely agree with your points. I am lucky that I will be able to attend, so I feel that it is my duty to do so.

  22. RCB*

    #1, it’s not political, it’s governmental, that’s very different. If it were political they’d be telling you who to vote for or talking to you about things related to voting and candidates, but this is governmental, it’s making you aware of something that government officials are doing so that you can advocate (if you chose, it is optional) on an issue that impacts you professional and personally. That’s a much more accurate way to look at it and a better way to frame it in your mind and to others who worry this might be political.

    1. LW1*

      I like this perspective. Regardless of how people feel about the politics of an issue, it is so important to at least know how to get involved. Advocacy is huge in medicine and, at least in my experience, is largely bipartisan and issue focused.

  23. Fed Here*

    Maybe I’m overly sensitive as a fed who wonders every day if this is the day I’m let go, but I got a whiff of LW2 wanting to put this on corporate greed over a government that is actively and openly breaking the law and wreaking havoc. Again, I’m sensitive right now, but it would go a long way if people could take a beat to think before they assign blame. (And I’m fully aware of the irony of my comment.)

    2. Anon Fed Contractor*

      I mean, my company is a non-profit and very well run financially and we are still having to lay a lot of folks off. There’s simply no other way to make the numbers work.

    3. MsM*

      I don’t know that it’s looking to assign blame so much as denial that things really are that bad. And yeah, unfortunately, they are.

    4. Bonkers*

      I think a lot of people don’t realize how much government spending is an engine that drives the broader economy. I’m buckling in for a rollercoaster over the next few years.

      1. Inflatable Unicorn*

        That, and most people don’t realize that what they believe is a government useless spending project is another person’s lifesaving work.

        1. Paint N Drip*

          Ugh, so true – the short-sighted cruelty we are seeing will have such devastating consequences if these cuts are allowed to continue

        2. Guacamole Bob*

          I saw the results of a survey where they asked people if they thought the government should spend more or less on a bunch of different items, and what it showed is that people like many, many of the components of government spending but are really ill-informed about how much of the budget goes to which things. Many people are very swayed by examples of (seemingly) wasteful spending, discussion of fraud, and portrayals of the government as a bunch of bureaucrats. So people will be in favor of cutting jobs at the Department of Education or Health and Human Services but also be in favor of increasing funding for special education or programs for homeless individuals.

      2. Le Sigh*

        I also think a lot of people don’t realize the damage will not be limited to the DC metro area. It goes well beyond the stereotype of overpaid consultants with big homes in Northern VA — it’s already affecting people making below or average salaries doing a lot of critical work throughout the country.

    5. Smithy*

      Completely appreciate your sensitivity Fed, but as an ngo staff member that’s already gone through two rounds of layoffs – these questions are really coming from genuine points of not being fully informed combined with having their own emotional realities.

      During our first round of layoffs, there was a legal decision made on a number of people’s last day and some of those employees were asking if the legal decision would change their employment status. The dynamics of what these stop-work orders mean, how cash is or isn’t being paid out, what that means for an organization’s overall viability is genuinely not evenly known within organizations. I’ve gotten a couple emails from non-US government donors asking if things are settled and we have our projections figured out for the coming year.

      Tragically, these questions are more often than not coming from a place of just not knowing, vs having a snarkier or ideological perspective. Even my mother (where….) keeps on asking me about “who’s fixing this”? Combine this with all of us having some genuine big feelings, I’m just sharing how very uninformed many people are of this reality. Even when they work in the sector.

  24. ark*

    I cannot believe this even needs to be said, but OP5, you really should not be asking an AI legal questions. Like come on let’s use our own intelligence for a second and consider that.

    1. MsM*

      Eh, at least they had the sense to confirm with an actual human expert. (Although the cynic in me wonders if they went out of their way to find something the AI got right as a “see, they’re not that bad, are they?”)

    2. Myrin*

      This is pretty mean. I’m as puzzled as the next AAM reader by people who use text-generating programmes like search engines when they’re not in any way the same thing, but OP literally ended her letter with “that doesn’t seem right — so I thought I’d ask a real intelligence [= Alison, an expert in her field]”, which I’d say is using a lot more of her own intelligence than can be said for many others both online and IRL.

  25. Susannah*

    Something of a side point, but I wish people wouldn’t dismiss matters of actual values and human rights as being “politics” not worthy of discussion at the office. People starving or dying of treatable illnesses, for example, because of eviscerating USAID isn’t “politics.” It’s life-and-death, and it’s human dignity and decency (or indecency).

    1. Kivrin*

      1000%. By trying to follow the norms of … civility? harmony? we are pretending that we are not in a time that is NOT normal. This is a time for open discussion of the impact of the abusive acts of power that are destroying everything we take for granted. It’s not possible to separate “life” from “politics” — especially for anyone marginalized in any way. This is a time for revolution, not politeness.

      1. Bird names*

        >It’s not possible to separate “life” from “politics”<
        Yup, we use it to organize large swaths of life and if a small handful completely try to rip what remaining supportive powers to everyday life politics have, that goes right out of the window.
        I can understand people not wanting to discuss it at all times because that also leads to burnout, but in the situation of LW1, how are the supposed to pretend this is not happening?

    2. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      Organise and agitate outside work. Most important of all is to organise registration and voting.

      Work is generally not the place for any of this: it is a captive audience and many people just want to do their work with the superficial minimum of social interaction and then go home asap.

      Some are already very stressed by what is happening and don’t want to be doom-vented on at work too.
      If you find some coworkers actually voted for policies you despise, then it could be very difficult to work with them professionally, so you seethe 40 hrs every week – and maybe your employer then decides work would get on better without you.

      This OP case is different: the manager was giving information directly relevant to future work and jobs, plus an important reminder not to identify your employer at political marches or demonstrations.

    3. A*

      I agree with this on paper.

      I think in practicality, there are a lot of jobs that simply cannot turn into a news room or a debating hour and remain productive.

      It’s hard to distinguish between healthy discussion of current events and hotly debated political discourse. Sometimes 5 people can watch the same exchange and have 5 different opinions on where it fell.

      So places take the simpler way of just not discussing it at all.

      What is happening to America right now is a terrible miscarriage of democracy. I do not dispute that. I also think that sometimes we all have to set that aside and do whatever it is we need to do. Work, feed our kids, go to the doctor, work out, all sorts of things have to be performed without devolving into a political debate.

    4. Qwerty*

      People deserve to be able to focus on their work at work.

      If you want people to be discussing a topic in the office, you don’t get to choose the “correct” phrase that everyone says. You also have to accept the “incorrect” ones.

      Do you really want to listen to someone gloat about the cost savings of defunding USAID? Or refer to government workers as lazy / corrupt / etc while praising DOGE? Saying awful things about your friends or family affected by various executive orders?

      Most people I know limit how much they can intake or discuss news each day to protect their mental health. Work is their safe place and many people can’t concentrate if they are being regularly reminded of all the stressors in their life.

    5. Emily Byrd Starr*

      Absolutely. This is SO not in the same category as referring to the president as Buttface or some other juvenile insult that has no place at work.

  26. NYer*

    I do not know if this is legal, but I worked for a company that was closing and in leui of the WARN notification, they gave us 3 months pay and health insurance and allowed us to use our work phones and emails. One of the higher ups said they might have to file for bankruptcy.

    1. Hlao-roo*

      I’m not a lawyer, but from the Department of Labor website I found the following (directed at employees):

      You must receive a written notice 60 days before the date of a mass layoff or plant closing if you meet the conditions discussed in this brochure. If your
      employer does not give you the required notice, you may be able to seek
      damages for back pay and benefits for up to 60 days, depending on how many
      days’ notice you actually received.

      And directed to employers:

      An employer who violates WARN is liable to each affected employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of violation, up to 60
      days. This liability may be reduced by any wages the employer pays over the
      notice period.

      So my layperson understanding is that your company violated the WARN Act*, but paid more than they legally needed to for violating the Act.

      *Probably violated the WARN Act. Depends on specifics of how many people your company employed and a few other exceptions to the WARN Act.

      1. doreen*

        Also , it probably depends on exactly how the three months pay and insurance was provided. Was it “You are terminated effective today and here’s a lump sum of 3 months pay” or was it ” Your employment will end three months from today – during those three months you will continue to be paid as usual, your health insurance will continue and you will continue to have access to work phones and email. The only difference is that you will not be performing any work for us during those three months. “

    2. Also-ADHD*

      That is legal – you can give WARN notice as garden leave (with benefits+pay) instead of notice while working.

  27. Trevor*

    “I asked an AI” = “I burned down a tree for something I could have asked a normal search engine that would have given me the correct information.”

    Don’t normalize this.

    1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      Yes, Google has started giving me what they state is an AI summary at the top every query. (I’m in Europe, so I don’t know if Google inflicts this on US users too)
      I’m hunting to see how I can switch this off. GRRRR, bugger!

      1. Lady Lessa*

        If you find it, please, please let us know. I hate it as well.

        And don’t get me started how Outlook has Copilot as a constant option. (If you know a way to disable that as well, much appreciation as well.)

        1. Kay*

          There is a way (so I have read), I just haven’t done it yet since it is on the order of open command prompt, kernel blah blah, delete line x kind of stuff. I’m debating hiring someone more savvy to do this so I can save myself from having to pay someone to save me when I break things in my effort to escape Copilot.

          If I recall, I found the answer with a bunch of googling.

      2. Crepe Myrtle*

        I read that putting “-ai” at the end of your query will do this. So does including a swear word that starts with F in your query.

      3. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

        Including the string &udm=14 at the end of the search tells google to give you the web-only search.

        The site udm14.com is an easy front end: there’s a one-sentence explanation. it looks like an old-style google search page passes your search to google with udm14, and then a large, friendly search box.

      4. Samoth*

        Weird lifehack I’ve learned recently: if you add a swear word somewhere in your query, it disables the AI search result. Weird world we live in, huh?

      5. A Bonny mouse*

        I simply switched to a different search engine. I use Ecosia now and the results seem to be just as good, if not better than Google (no AI hallucinations and more websites instead of social media in the results)

      6. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

        If swearing stops the AI, I would love that! AI is a precious snowflake :)
        Thanks all, I’ll try these suggestions
        It’s not just the principle of the thing – I genuinely don’t trust the AI summary, even more than being careful about anything else I read online

      7. Myrin*

        There is a way to implement a… I don’t think it’s an add-on? A script, maybe?… into your browser which gets rid of all that AI summary nonsense. I saw it very early on when all this crap started and have literally never encountered one such summary in the wild. (I have meanwhile also switched away from Google but sometimes still use it for trickier searches.) I’ll see if I can find the explanation again, it was very easy to follow!

      8. Owlet101*

        Type in “-ai” after every search. It gets rid of the summary box.

        Yes, they push it on the US users a well and have for some time now.

      9. Eukomos*

        I couldn’t find a way to do it on Google, but Duckduckgo makes it pretty easy to turn AI suggestions off and has good privacy protections so I switched to that.

  28. A*

    5: AI is a potential problem in a lot of situations.

    AI is not the problem in this specific letter.

    Sometimes it feels like any time AI is mentioned, either in a letter or a comment, the conversation derails into people talking about how much they hate AI. I get it, there are legitimate concerns about AI especially as it is coming of age in this presidential administration. But not all AI is bad, in fact, AI has the potential to contribute a lot to fields like healthcare.

    I don’t think whipping yourself into a lather about AI every time it is referenced helps the LW or, frankly, anybody else.

    1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      In a lot of cases it IS a problem, not a help, such as when it invents its own facts or plagiarises.
      A big problem is that it usually sounds so plausible and knowledgeable – like every great bullshitter.

      1. A*

        “I get it, there are legitimate concerns about AI especially as it is coming of age in this presidential administration.”

    2. juliebulie*

      Potential is about the future. While we are living in the present, we have to accept AI for what it is now, not what we hope it can be someday.

    3. bighairnoheart*

      I don’t disagree that it’s meaningless to focus too much on the AI aspect of this letter. But it’s a little disingenuous to equate the way the OP used AI to the way scientists use AI to identify cancer cells, etc. They’re two completely different things. Colloquially, when people on this website complain about AI, they’re talking about ChatGPT, AI art generators, etc. which have very little (if any) value compared to all the issues they cause.

    4. CatDude*

      I think part of this is that a lot of people (myself included) often use ‘AI’ as shorthand for generative AI specifically. There are applications of AI that can be helpful but generative AI is not one of them.

      1. Six for the truth over solace in lies*

        Yes, gen AI is only a small fraction of what AI is used for, and doesn’t even necessarily have much to do with them in technology or use case. LLM-based generative AI is really prominent right now because it makes the most easy-to-use “fun” “toys,” but a lot of the work that’s going to have the most impact on workers and how people find and use information are in AI agents of various far more specialized types.

        This is also why “AI can’t make human images with the right number of fingers, how could it ever make hiring decisions?” is understandable but not really relevant, because the purpose, the technology, the back end, and the body of knowledge the two draw from is completely different. It’s like saying “PhotoShop can’t even make a pivot table, how can you expect it to color correct an image?” Well, because it’s a different piece of software with different purpose, different code, different optimization, different UI than Excel. They’re both software but they are otherwise apples and oranges.

    5. Hroethvitnir*

      I wasn’t going to comment, and I always wince when people use environmental impacts as a winning argument (it’s been terribly misrepresentated and isn’t accurate at all to say a given query is worse than us commenting on AAM), but.

      Improved algorithms for pattern matching in imaging is nothing to do with LLMs, and this person is talking about using an LLM to ask a legal question.

      Generative AI is stringing words together, not understanding anything, so asking it questions you care about the answer to is a truly awful thing to be becoming normalised. (Neat that it works so well, but not even a little to be trusted.)

    6. Emily Byrd Starr*

      I’m no fan of AI, but sometimes artificial intelligence is better than natural stupidity.

  29. Dido*

    Lol, did LW 5 really think she discovered a life hack where she only has to work one hour a day to get paid her full salary? It’s extremely common to be required to use PTO if you’re gone for more than 2-4 hours in a single day

  30. learnedthehardway*

    OP#4 – I would bring this rumour to your manager and let them handle it. You could push back about the rumour to the specific person who told you they’d heard it, but I would not take it upon myself to speak for the company. Yes, you can see the actual data, but making announcements to the workforce at large about company HR policy isn’t part of your role, and it may, in fact, be better to not make statements about this rumour. That will just draw attention to it and make it more of an issue in the minds of the workforce.

    For one thing, anyone who is with the company will see for themselves that new hires do NOT automatically lose their jobs after 90 days. I’m sure there is attrition – some people quit, others aren’t suited to the role and are let go.

    It’s possible that your company has an extremely high level of attrition for new workers – that may be something to flag to management, together with the rumour. If that’s the case, it probably means your company’s recruiting and/or onboarding & new hire training processes are not working well. Either the wrong people are hired or the training doesn’t prepare them for the role or both.

    1. Mystik Spiral*

      OP4 here, I would never take it upon myself to make a company wide announcement. :) I just wasn’t sure if the rumor was enough to alert my manager of Director of Field Personnel.

  31. AngryOwl*

    I’ve been very lucky that almost everywhere I’ve worked as a salaried/exempt person, the general rule was that if you worked at all, don’t use any PTO. It was only for full days that you truly didn’t work.

    That’s really the only way salaried/exempt is worth it, in my opinion. Companies need to trust that people manage their time correctly or find another way to do things.

  32. CatDude*

    LW1 – I just ignore people who complain about things being “too political”, as if the effects of politics is something that can be neatly put away in a box. These politics have a direct effect on LW’s employer, so it’s very relevant. Plus, it’s reasonable for their employer to clarify that employees are free to go to the march but should avoid looking like they are representing their employer.

    So LW1 is definitely correct, but I also wouldn’t bother arguing with the co-worker. Nothing can be gained from that.

    1. LW1*

      Thanks, I completely agree. I don’t believe that my friend is completely beyond convincing, so I haven’t given up there yet, but I would never let his perspectives affect my actions.

  33. LiberryPie*

    I assume LW 3’s coworker has done other things that seem like prying, but those examples don’t seem so bad to me. In fact I just did almost the same thing yesterday! A coworker emailed the weekend before a deadline saying that she’d completed her piece of the project and was about to go out of town to visit family. She had an OOO listing a return date, and when I emailed her the following week I saw the return date had been extended, so I wrote “I hope everything is okay!” She’s a private person, so if she doesn’t reply to that at all I wouldn’t think anything of it. Certainly I wouldn’t think she was trying to grey rock against my “prying,” because I wasn’t prying! I thought she might appreciate that I’d noticed something was up, and I care, and I am genuinely not trying to get information out of her.

    In the LW’s case it’s a little different because her coworker is imagining a pattern that isn’t there. But “I don’t mean to pry. Hope you’re okay” might really mean just that!

    1. bighairnoheart*

      I agree that “I don’t mean to pry. Hope you’re okay” is fine in most cases, including the example you gave. It’s in context of the rest of her behavior + the preceding comment about noticing how much sick leave OP uses (why would a coworker pay that much attention to a few isolated sick days and make such a wild leap?) that makes it very reasonable for OP to assume this person might be digging for info and responding politely, but accordingly.

  34. Observer*

    #2 – Quick lay offs.

    There is an additional factor to think about. Many of the companies (both for and non profit) also have a lot of staff who are actually technically not employees, but contractors. And those people are not covered by the WARN act.

    Given the nature of many of these positions, I’d be willing to bet that there is a TON of misclassification involved.

    1. Coverage Associate*

      Or the federal government grants money to a foundation or other nonprofit that distributes the money to smaller nonprofits.

      One of the plaintiffs against the federal government is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. They allege that they had to layoff a bunch of people when the government stopped refugee resettlement funds.

      I was curious about basically LW2’s question, whether they had to do those layoffs so quickly, so I pulled their income tax statements. (Nonprofits’ taxes are easily available on the IRS website.) This particular nonprofit gets about half its annual funding from the government and has about a year’s expenses as assets. But, as mentioned, probably not all liquid assets, so they would likely have to take investment losses if they dipped into investments to pay operating costs.

      Just one example.

      1. Observer*

        You are correct. But there is absolutely a matter of people who are being fired who are classified as contractors. I heard about it in the context of these people not being able to collect unemployment insurance, because in most states only employees are covered.

  35. Phony Genius*

    On #1, I also think there is a difference if they said you could participate in the march during work hours without charging time. It doesn’t sound like it, especially because participants are being asked not to wear anything identifying. Otherwise, it would probably violate some sort of rule for receiving funding.

  36. Alice*

    LW 4 — I agree that firing people at 89 days so that they couldn’t use their accrued sick leave would be awful, and also nonsensical in light of the investment it takes to onboard people. It’s good that you are thinking about how to clarify things.
    But personally, I wouldn’t call the “five days of paid sick time per year” policy non-awful. Especially for a job that presumably has to be done in person (“field employees”)? Your employees are going to be coming to work while they are sick, which isn’t great for productivity — especially if they pass their illness on to others. And if I read your letter correctly, 40 hours is also the accrual limit? So if they are lucky one year, no sickness or injuries or caregiving, and then unlucky the next, with 6 or more sick days, they will have to take unpaid leave? OK, that’s not *as bad* as firing everyone at 89 days, but it’s not *good*.

    1. Mystik Spiral*

      LW4 here, we are an electrical contractor employing union electricians. It is typical of the industry to NOT have paid time off. When the sick time law passed in our state a couple of years ago it was a BIG DEAL. We follow the law with our policy, so while it seems slim, it’s the law. We could be more generous, and my manager has gone round and round with HR to request we be more generous, but HR says no.

      Keep in mind they DO belong to a union, and they have vacation funds, health insurance, etc. Sick time is just something that hasn’t existed in the construction world. My husband works construction too and he still forgets to request sick time if he needs it because he’s so not used to it.

      1. Coverage Associate*

        Do the paystubs not recite accrued sick leave? When the sick leave law was passed here in California, I thought paystubs added that line. (I haven’t paid attention because I am exempt and billable hour requirements mean my weeks average over 40 hours, but I know my employer at the time was trying to track accrued sick leave, even for exempt employees.)

        1. Mystik Spiral*

          Yes, pay stubs show previous sick time balance, sick time accrued, sick time used, and new sick time balance.

    2. WasAGMKid*

      LW 4 — I agree that firing people at 89 days so that they couldn’t use their accrued sick leave would be awful, and also nonsensical in light of the investment it takes to onboard people. It’s good that you are thinking about how to clarify things.

      Just as an aside, this was a thing for auto manufacturers back in the day.

      The folks were called “89ers”, and you sometimes had to work this way for a bit before actually getting hired on full time. So by the time you’d been through a few 89 day cycles you were fully trained before becoming a full-fledge employee, and any people that couldn’t/wouldn’t take the risk had already self-selected out.

      Now you work through a sub-contractor for a while (or, forever) before getting hired on by the actual manufacturer. So same concept just another layer of deniability.

  37. Ess Ess*

    For the nosy coworker, I would have made it a little more obvious that it was boundary-crossing…
    I would respond that I was a little uncomfortable hearing that she is tracking and commenting on my personal appointments.

    1. Delta Delta*

      I’d turn it around. “Gee! You’ve got such a good handle on my medical comings-and-goings! I should let you schedule my next mammogram!”

      But I recognize that 2025 is the Year of Petty and I am here for it.

  38. post script*

    LW4 – unfortunately, there are workplaces that operate that way. I worked at one where I realized that they routinely fired people around 89 days because benefits kicked in at 90 days. I calculated the turnover from the (almost) 3 months I was there and if it held for the year, it was about 250%! There was no union. It was a wildly unethical place in other ways, too. It was kind of a relief to be fired.

    1. Mystik Spiral*

      LW4 here – Oh I believe it! I just know for a fact that my company doesn’t, because I do all their payroll and final checks. :)

  39. I'm just here for the cats!!*

    #1 agree 100% with Alison. When you work for someplace that relies on government funding their is going to be talk about politics. It was not like your boss was encouraging or demanding that you take part in this. In fact the boss was doing the right thing so that you as an employee were doing things in the right way.

  40. Lissa Landon*

    I like how we have it set up – if you are gone 4 hours, you need to take sick leave, but you can take whatever amount of time that you actually use – so, you can take 4 hours or 5 1/2 hours or whatever. If you are gone less than 4 hours, you don’t use leave, and they figure it all comes out in the wash.

  41. Confused Anon*

    Maybe somebody can help me out — I still don’t understand the laws regarding overtime exemption (assume I’m in a US state that does not have additional protections beyond the federal ones.)

    At my last job, I was salaried and exempt (yes, definitely exempt, I checked.) My boss regularly had me working 6 days a week and thought this was normal. At one point, I arranged my schedule to have three consecutive days off (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), with my boss’s permission, because my long-distance partner was visiting from out of town. For the each of the weeks on either side of that long weekend, I worked five days and 35 hours. I did not have any PTO because I had used my 10 days of PTO already for a vacation that had been planned before I started the job (and I cleared it with my boss before I accepted the job offer.) My boss docked my pay for this long weekend, prorating my salary to 70 hours instead of 80 for the two week period. Was this illegal? My research about overtime exemption says that employees can take unpaid time off if it’s at their own request — is that what happened here, or did my boss break the law? I’m not interested in chasing her down for this money (I never want to have anything to do with her again) but I’m curious for future situations.

    1. M*

      Yes, illegal, as far as I can tell. She can’t pay you for less than 40 hours a week if you’re salaried exempt. It doesn’t matter that you were out of PTO. (I had this happen right at the end of the year – got sick, was out of sick time, came in under 40 hours for one week. My boss said she wasn’t sure what would happen but that HR might say I’d just be paid for hours worked. I decided to keep quiet for the moment and just check my pay stub. I was paid for 40 hours.)

  42. fhqwhgads*

    The thing that’s always sort of puzzled me about this is the bit where the boss mentioned using PTO or making up the hours. I get that the law is you have to be paid because you’re exempt and says nothing of making you use PTO. But I thought there was also a thing about if you start treating an exempt employee like they’re non-exempt you can lose the right to classify them as exempt. Any talk about “making up hours” seems to me to be treating someone as non-exempt.
    So, in the answer to the letter, the part about “they can dock your PTO” again makes sense to me. But it seems like it’d need to start and stop with that? Because once they’re telling an exempt employee to make up hours…that seems to run afoul of the “treating exempt employees like they’re not exempt” thing. So I don’t know how to reconcile the two, or if the answer is just the “making up hours” thing isn’t enough to cross the line so it doesn’t matter.

    1. Ask a Manager* Post author

      “Treating exempt employees like they’re not exempt” really only refers to docking their pay based their hours or not meeting the duties test. It doesn’t include asking them to make up hours.

  43. Cordelia Comments*

    I would really appreciate it if commenters could refrain from assuming how old LW5 is or generalizing about “young people” using AI. My older coworkers use ChatGPT way more often than I do despite some commenters assumptions. It really has nothing to do with age.

  44. Rae*

    If LW #5 didn’t have any PTO, would their company need to pay them for 40 hours? Maybe their PTO balance would go to -7?

  45. Raida*

    3. Responding to a nosy coworker

    Personally I’d focus on this comment “We both have more medical appointments than the rest of the team! ”
    And respond with “I certainly hope you are not tracking time off or flex time used by your co-workers.”

    Just to put her off balance – that’s not her job, she doesn’t know what appointments are for, she’s not entitled to the information, “We” use the most is trying to make you have something in common, and ranking appointments means she’s got a mental list of *things to gossip about*
    And she IS a gossip, so I’d be honestly probably bringing it up casually with our boss so they can be aware this is maybe fodder for Miss Gossip.

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