Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done this, though I didn't realize what I was doing at the time. I was working for Sun Microsystems, which gave me two weeks of vacation time. Sun was doing a forced shutdown over the week of the 4th of July, which burned 4 days, and then there was the inevitable "shutdown" over christmas break, which burned another three days. This left me with 3 days of "elective" vacation time. A wedding took care of those. I…
Until today I have never heard of a US company forcing employee's to use "forced shutdown" days - which I'm interpreting to mean the company telling people they have off on a certain day - as vacation days, and this is the second time (at least) it's been mentioned in this thread. How common is this exactly? Because this sounds like a company that is really, really screwing it's employees.
At my company, the factory has 7,000 employees in one location. So many people took vacation between Christmas and New Years that the factory simply can not operate. The solution was either to only give that time off for a select group of people (pissing off most of the factory guys), or to make everyone take that time off (pissing off the few that used to come in that week and goof off).
Unfortunately they extended it from the guys in the factory up to the engineers. Which really makes no sense. I'm working on a project that won't hit the factory floor for another year. Why can't I work between Christmas and New Years? I would be amazingly produtive without all the meetings and distractions. Not only do we have to take the time off and use vacation (or not get paid and don't come in), but we are not allowed to come in even if we wanted to. I assume this is all negotiated with the unions, they never want the salaried guys to have perks that they don't have. So for I end up burning 3-5 out of 10 vacation days a year on a week I absolutely do NOT want to take off. But I still get paid for those days at least. And there are ways to get around it (floating holidays, i.e. work 40 hours in 4 days in a week with a holiday gives you the holiday back) which in effect allow you to have your full 2 weeks. If that was not the case I think the salaried engineers would have fought back against the practice more. Although I guess most people with kids like that week off anyway, I just view it as a waste, I like taking my vacation during the times those with kids can't take vacation. Everything is cheaper and less crowded.
A 'furlow' is an unpaid day that the company forces you to take. A lot of government employees have these now, you must take 1-5 days off a year and not get paid for those days. In effect it is a pay cut but in exchance you get more vacation days. The most interesting thing about the furlough is that very often you see people given a choice between everyone taking a few days furlough or a bunch of people getting fired. More often than not, everyone votes to have a few people fired.