Skip to main content
The city of Portland in the past decade doubled the bonus vacation hours it awards to employees not represented by unions, many of them supervisors and managers.
That’s the upshot of five years of data WW obtained through a public records request. It shows how many city employees received up to two weeks of additional paid time off each year through what’s called management leave. The leave is intended to reward nonunion employees—about one-fifth of the city’s total workforce—for outstanding performance.
The city’s administrative rules for the leave make it clear it’s supposed to be a reward based on merit. “The intent of management leave is to recognize exceptional additional individual efforts, performance and achievements, including but not limited to beyond the standard workweek,” the rules say. “The granting of management leaves and the amount of leave awarded, is at the discretion of the bureau director and does not constitute guaranteed time off for nonrepresented employees.”
But judging from the numbers, bureau directors are finding more and more of their middle managers to be exceptional.
In 2024, bureau directors at the city awarded an additional 88,240 hours of paid time off to nonunion-represented employees. That’s twice the 43,289 additional hours awarded in 2013.
The data also shows that far more eligible employees received the leave than a decade ago. In 2024, 1,460 employees received management leave—an average of 60 additional hours apiece. That’s up from 2013, when 798 employees received extra paid leave.
To be sure, employees without union representation miss out on all the protections a union offers: bargaining for higher pay and better health care, protection against firings, and the ability to strike when demands aren’t met. In that regard, giving such employees an annual bonus might make sense.
But the data provided by the city would suggest the city’s system of management leave has become an expectation rather than a reward for going above and beyond the call of duty, as was intended. And the program grew to its largest known size the year before the city faced a historic budget deficit and significant cuts to its basic services.
City Councilor Steve Novick says the doubling of hours granted troubles him.
“If something episodic becomes routine, then that should be as a result of a deliberate and open decision to adopt a policy,” Novick says, “rather than something that just happens gradually without people really talking about it.”
Management leave last received public scrutiny in a 2013 story in The Oregonian. At the time, the newspaper wrote that the leave system had become sloppy, “finding that city officials provided minimal oversight and accountability in the program.”
Following The Oregonian’s story, the city changed its policy to require a written reason for each leave awarded. And in 2014, the paper reported that management leave hours had dropped modestly—from 47,523 hours in 2012 to 43,289 in 2013—perhaps as a result of the attention.
But the guardrails around management leave seem to have loosened in the decade since.
By 2024, a total of 1,460 eligible employees received management leave. The city could not provide a clear total number of employees who were eligible last year due to a handful of unionizations, but since 2021 about 75% of eligible employees have received management leave every year. That’s an increase from 64% in 2013.
Nonunion employees earned an average hourly wage of $68.33, or $131,193, in 2024. Simple math would suggest that additional paid time off granted last year totaled a little over $6 million—a threefold increase from $1.9 million in 2013.
City spokeswoman Carrie Belding says the city does “not have data that explains the reasons behind” the steep increase in hours awarded and “cannot speculate.”
But past directors told WW that management leave during the COVID-19 years was distributed by bureau directors in hopes it would boost morale and retention. It was also used, again informally, by bureau directors to offset a temporary freeze on cost-of-living adjustments for nonrepresented employees in 2019, and later a cap on raises for management.
A former bureau director says it was one of the “few carrots” directors could offer nonunion employees during the pandemic.
Former bureau directors at the city told WW each bureau director handled the process slightly differently. But for the most part, division managers would submit the names of each eligible employee and offer a short, one- or two-sentence description of why that employee did, or did not, deserve additional leave. The bureau director reviewed the nominations and filled out the leave forms for each employee they deemed deserving.
There has historically been no grading matrix or objective point system to determine recipients, former bureau directors said. And some say they were keen to avoid giving one division in their bureau a bunch of management leave and not another division—so it’s become increasingly standard to offer most eligible employees at least some extra hours.
One former bureau director said employees who received extra leave the year before came to expect the same the following year.
“We said a million times, this is not an expectation,” the former bureau director said. “But across the city, it became an expectation. It was pretty unusual for someone who got time the previous year to not get that amount the next year.”
Plus, giving out the perk didn’t actually cost the bureaus anything because it was wages that would’ve been paid anyway.
Kari Koch is president of the city’s newest union, the City of Portland Professional Workers Union, which represents about 750 employees. All those employees were eligible for management leave last year—and remain eligible until a contract is ratified. Koch says the program is deeply flawed.
“Some bureaus and some supervisors are extremely generous with it and give it out without much explanation or cause,” Koch says, “while other bureaus and supervisors are oppositional to it, seemingly on principle, and are very stingy with it. There’s no clarity for us as to why some people get it and others don’t.”
A spokesman for Mayor Keith Wilson, Cody Bowman, says the mayor is “actively reviewing the administration of management leave to ensure it remains a merit-based award that aligns with the city’s evolving standards for oversight.”