My (previous) employer switched to Unlimited Vacation midway through the COVID pandemic. Many coworkers, including myself, assumed that this was a cost-saving m

My (previous) employer switched to Unlimited Vacation midway through the COVID pandemic. Many coworkers, including myself, assumed that this was a cost-saving measure to help cover up the fact that employees were not taking their usual vacations during pandemic--largely since they had nowhere to go. The legal stipulation was that you had the existing bucket of legally accrued vacation that you would continue to drain until you ran out, after which you would switch to the "unlimited" pool. Many people rushed to use their time off--I was a little suspicious of it, and continued to ration my time-off as I usually did (which is basically only taking a week off around July 4th and Christmas, to see family). Sure enough, some months later, a large portion of us were sold-off/laid-off, and I still had about 80 hours of vacation time accrued prior to the switch, which was a decent chunk of change when it paid out. The people that had been riding the "unlimited" days got diddly.