As a German I find the concept of “allotted sick days” disturbing.
What if I told you that it usually also takes away from your vacation days?
So if you get sick too often, no vacation for you that year.
That’s sick (pun intended). Over here it’s the other way around: When we get sick during a vacation, we get the vacation days back.
My sick days and PTO are the same. I have a chronic illness I’m working with doctors to treat. Between occasional sick days, and doctors visits, I never get a vacation day
That really sucks. I’ve never had a job where they separated PTO and sick days. They just pool them together.
Damn, the US needs to get their shit together
How inconsiderate of you, think of the billionaires who would suffer!
I’ve been lucky enough to always have a job in the public sector and it’s very common they are completely separate. Likely less pay, but far better retirement system than most private sector jobs.
I’ve worked at companies that do both. There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
The worst of all is so called unlimited PTO.
There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
I get why you consider “getting more money” a pro, but in my book any financial incentive to avoid taking a sick day when you are actually sick and instead try to power through and infect everyone in the office should be considered as con.
Well I’ve worked at a few places where they’ve transitioned between the two methods. They just end up taking your vacation days + sick days and calling it PTO. So you end up with the same number of days off but a bit of flexibility on how to use them. If you have a great year and don’t get sick, that’s 5 to 10 more days you can take off without pretending you are sick. I don’t see a big difference if my 36 days comes out of 1 bucket or two.
Also, a lot of places don’t have caps on sick days so if you don’t use them in a year, you can carry forward into the next year.
Very few places will give unlimited sick days.
So you end up with the same number of days off but a bit of flexibility on how to use them.
That’s the problem - sick days should not have a “flexibility” aspect to them. You take them when you are sick, so that you can heal and so that you can avoid infecting other people.
Since you don’t have a choice about being sick, ideally there shouldn’t be a choice about whether or not you take a sick day - but realistically this can’t be tightly enforced (at least not with reasonable measures), that it ends up relying on good will, and that there will always be incentives to fake sickness in order to take sick days and incentives to ignore sickness and still go to work (and these incentives don’t balance each other out - they incentivize different people differently, widening the gap of unfairness)
But still - even if you accept that real life have such deficiencies - this does not mean one should create policies that make them even more deficient!
That’s not the case in the UK, your annual leave is a legal entitlement, and unrelated to any sick time you may have to take.
The workers of your nation need to organise a few general strikes to get their basic rights sorted out, I don’t like seeing workers abused.
Jokes on you, I haven’t been able to afford a vacation in a decade 😂😭
Yeah WTF, what if you get sick again? Do you tell the flu to sit it out or prepetuate the epidemic?
Yes
Believe it out not, straight to jail.
I was always told to never call in sick. If you’re sick, you go to work and only if the manager says to go home should you leave work.
Again, WTF?
Shit that doesn’t even save you at some places. I was working and started feeling shitty ended up having a 103° fever, and was sent home. It still counted as an absence against me during my review.
So compare that with my experience of a few years ago when one of my relatives had an accident, and I was the one who could care for them for a few weeks.
Their conversation with their boss:
- Hey boss, I had an accident, I’ll be out of work for a bit.
- Oh, what happened?
- Look, I would rather not talk about it.
- When are you coming back?
- It will most likely be a month.
- Okay, see you in a month then.My conversation:
- Hey HR person, I need two weeks of care leave to care for a relative.
- Okay, see you in two weeks!And that was all that’s legally required of us, and legally permitted to the employers. We were both fully paid for the leave, as both employers were insured for exactly this. And the sky hasn’t fallen, and the GDP is up, and we still live in a prosperous first world country.
Damn that sounds nice.
Yeah that would not fly. In America, workers are viewed as children and owners are parents. The owners feel like their children are trying to get out of work. It’s the owners job, as the responsible parental figure to steer the child-employee in the right direction. American workers are unable to be responsible on their own. (Mind you these are all adults).
You also see this in American academia with faculty routinely referring to grown adult students as “kids.”
You get everyone else sick, like Supply Side Jesus intended!
Unfortunately you’re likely taking unpaid time off until short term disability kicks in (usually 6 weeks)
wait until you see this documentary they made a few years ago, called “Breaking Bad”.
What if I told you merging PTO with sick days was to get around the Federal requirement for employers to not use your use of sick days against you. By eliminating sick days and rolling them all into one pool, they now can use being sick as an excuse to fire you.
Haben wir bei uns auch, nur dass es natürlich deutlich mehr Tage sind
I had a coworker whose kids got sick back to back and then his wife, and then he got ill too. By March, he had no PTO and had to cancel his vacation that summer. He was worn the fuck out come summer. I think he was able to flex to work “four tens” here and there, but it sucks that “sick” and “vacation” are not only the same bucket, but could get you punished.
As a European I can’t grasp this concept. As if sickness is something somebody chooses by will.
Where I work, I get 5 days worth of PTO which can be used for either sick time or vacation time. It takes (8) 40 hour weeks to generate 1 new PTO day. We’re not allowed to take unpaid time off, you’re required to use your PTO. If you do not have any PTO left, you go up to 40 hours negative. You are then required to work 40 weeks to break out of the negative. If you decide to quit or are fired while in the negative, that hourly difference is deducted from your last paycheck.
It didn’t used to be this way. The family owned company I work for was bought out by a 500 million dollar corporation.
Shits fucked yo.
There’s no way them deducting pay out of your last paycheck is legal in any way. How hasn’t soneone sued the hell out of them?
I’ve worked at companies where sick days are part of PTO and others where sick days are separate. In the past 2 years, I’ve had 1 with pti covering it all and 2 with separate vacation and sick accruals.
Having “an amount” of sick days is absurd. I may get sick or not. If I have an amount, I may even be compelled to reach it.
Of course we always use all our sick days. Its a game and I’m only commenting on how its typically done.
Is this one of those comics where you have to laugh otherwise you’d cry because it’s so true?
cries in working parent
My employer gives us 8 sick days a year. When we run out of those we are supposed to use vacation time. It’s downright depressing how fast we blow through the sick time in a bad winter season.
I’m very very lucky to work from home, so I can neglect my sick kid at home while getting work done and thus avoid having to burn through my vacation time as well. Others aren’t so lucky.
This is pretty much illegal in most European countries btw. But not all countries assure sick children time off.
Actually I’ve read studies saying people who took their full PTO tended to get better year over year raises.
I would like to see how they handled companies that have “unlimited” PTO.
Is PAID Time Off ever unlimited?
This might be confusing cause and effect. People who feel more secure in their jobs are more comfortable taking time off.
I finally have a job that has good benefits, after only having contract work and unpaid internships in the past. I have unlimited pto and unlimited sick days.
I am too scared to use them because I don’t want to accidentally use too much.
Yeah it’s funny, a lot of companies are switching to “unlimited PTO” because studies show the average employee ends up using less.
I co-owned and worked at a small business and we tried unlimited PTO.
We had to add a two-week minimum clause because some people weren’t even taking that.
As an employee, I came to prefer a fixed amount that expired because it felt like it should all be used.
With unlimited, it seems some people who felt guilty or loyal or “busy” would take less while others who felt entitled would take more.
I don’t think there’s ever been a bad Mr. Lovenstein strip.
![Performance Review [Mr. Lovenstein]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d0e1dd89-f03c-40f6-bc8e-2b4ae8519d74.png){kind=link}