Unpaid leave

Unpaid leave (also leave without pay ) is one of the types of leave provided for by the employment relationship between the employee and the employer. It can be either voluntary (at the request of the employee) or forced (at the request of the employer). Voluntary is not paid and usually amounts to no more than 7 days in state institutions, but private companies have the right to dictate their conditions. At the same time, unpaid leave is often viewed by employers as one of the methods to mitigate the financial consequences of an economic crisis. Under him, workers are not laid off , but go on leave without pay. This makes it possible to save considerably on wages without further aggravating official unemployment, although the incomes of the population, and hence the standard of living, continue to deteriorate. A considerable number of enterprises resorted to unpaid leave in the period after the collapse of the USSR and the related industrial crisis, and such leave could last for months and even years, accompanied by delays in wages. At the same time in the Western capitalist countries of the Anglo-Saxon model (United States, United Kingdom) unpaid leave is not widely spread (except for state institutions where it lasts a maximum of one to two weeks). Private employers in them prefer to immediately massively reduce (that is, lay off staff redundancies) workers during the period of economic recession, while maintaining high wages for the rest. In France, Korea, Germany and other countries with a strong socialist element in capitalism, a mixed approach to the use of unpaid leave prevails.