To be fair, I'm not defending having to beg your boss for time off.

In our world we have a simple choice: work for whoever will hire you, or starve and die on the streets. Barring random and uncontrollable acts of charity or the extremely fortunate situation in which you work for yourself.

Now we could go back and forth on where on the spectrum of "you would be working all day miserably farming if it weren't for your job" and "you should feel blessed to die of black lung in the coal mines cause at least you got to work" we both lie. But, in a society where the majority of work involves "work or die", our promises to our bosses are very short periods of indentured servitude in a very hyperbolic sense.

Sure, you can quit at any time only to find another job or be taken to jail (we could go into the criminalization of homelessness), but for most people, you're working for life.

So to say that the government (or employment contract) mandating that you're owed days of vacation is an expression of freedom is a far cry from my definition of freedom and to me seems only to entrench our status quo by throwing breadcrumbs to us to stop us from getting too agitated.

I was certainly being glib and hyperbolic tho

On the same take, we used to get 15min breaks every 2 or 3 hours. Then the government wrote laws that said we had to get at least 10min breaks every 4 hours. So now we get less because you will only ever get the minimum.

We get less breaks and they have to be shorter than what the average was before.

I'm not against labor laws, but I've been working nearly four decades now and I'm still getting bent over every opportunity.