Article 24: Right to rest and leisure, limitation of working hours, and periodic holidays with pay
Necessary
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
In the United States, unlike almost every other wealthy country, no law requires an employer to give any worker a single day of paid vacation or a paid holiday. As of 2021, only 79% of private-sector workers had any access to paid vacation at all, ranging from 95% in manufacturing and finance down to 43% in leisure and hospitality, so a large share of the gap sits entirely inside company policy. Working hours are only partly reached by law. Federal overtime pay rules raise the cost of long shifts but do not cap them, leaving actual scheduling, rest breaks and shift length up to employers. That is why shareholders have raised grueling schedules at warehouse and freight companies. No senator has yet been able to force a floor vote on guaranteeing paid vacation nationally, so the corporate lobbying fight that exists around paid sick leave has not yet been repeated here.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
No U.S. federal or state law guarantees any paid vacation or holiday, so whether a worker gets paid time off at all is set entirely by employer policy. Federal overtime law (the Fair Labor Standards Act) still constrains the cost, though not the amount, of long hours. Law therefore remains a partial actor alongside the employer.
We found a strong, well-documented business lobbying campaign against paid sick-leave mandates (see Article 25). We found no comparably organized, company-named lobbying campaign specifically opposing a paid-vacation mandate, since no such federal bill has advanced far enough to draw one. The same trade associations are positioned to oppose one but have not yet had to fight one in the open.
2 and 1, higher of the two, gives Necessary
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- 79 percent of private industry workers had access to paid vacation in 2021, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Economics Daily, 2022-08-31
- Sanders Introduces Legislation to Finally Guarantee Paid Vacation to US Workers, U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, 2024-03-22
- Investors Call for Paid Sick Leave Policy at Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific Railways, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2022-12-05
- Norfolk Southern gives some workers paid sick days after crash, CBS News, 2023-02-23
- Amazon shareholders vote down audit of warehouse work conditions, Computer Weekly, 2022-05
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Filed a 2022 shareholder proposal asking Norfolk Southern to adopt a standard paid sick/personal leave policy, which bears on rail workers' ability to get any day of rest without discipline under strict attendance systems.
Filed the parallel 2022 shareholder proposal at Union Pacific on paid leave policy.
Filed a 2022 shareholder proposal for an independent audit of Amazon warehouse working conditions, which the company's board opposed and shareholders voted down.
Amazon shareholders vote down audit of warehouse work conditions, Computer Weekly, 2022-05
2 campaigns on record
Adopt a standard, permanent employer-paid sick and personal leave policy, easing rigid attendance-point systems that penalized workers for taking any day off.
With Trillium Asset Management (at Union Pacific)
Result: Filed December 2022 for the 2023 annual meetings; we did not confirm the exact proxy vote percentage in the sources reviewed.
Norfolk Southern granted about 3,000 unionized track-maintenance workers four paid sick/personal days in February 2023 and dropped a 48-hour advance-notice rule for personal days; reporting credits union bargaining pressure after the East Palestine, Ohio derailment, not the shareholder vote itself, which appears to have followed rather than preceded the change.
Commission an independent audit of warehouse working conditions, covering injury rates and pace-of-work pressure that limits workers' rest during shifts.
Result: Rejected at the May 25, 2022 annual meeting; exact vote share was not confirmed in the sources reviewed.
We found no documented change to Amazon's warehouse audit practices resulting from this specific vote.
Amazon shareholders vote down audit of warehouse work conditions, Computer Weekly
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.