I think managers like you are important for helping cultivate perspectives that are better situated to challenge various bullshit under capitalism. Whilst some workplaces or managers actively make it difficult for people to take their earned vacation days, there are also plenty of places that will apply a passive pressure that causes people being disinclined to take time off. Working in the first kind of place can make you more vulnerable to the insidiousness of the second workplace.

Sometimes, in that second kind of workplace, when you insist on taking your vacation days, the pressure morphs into more overtime coercion, but often, there ends up being no repercussions — often, they don’t want to fight people on it, so they rely on workers effectively oppressing themselves.

The more people that are practiced at taking what they’re entitled to, the easier it is to resist shitty workplaces that try to deny us what few privileges our contracts entitle us.