It really shouldn’t. My company has reprimanded people for not responding their vacation days.
The law is very clear on this and courts have stated as well: vacations are meant for recovering your energy. Healing from an illness does not allow you to recover from work, so you must be granted that time again.
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
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.
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.
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!
Look, I’ve never been sick and not been paid for it. And I’ve never had to get a doctor’s note or anything like that. That would be the inevitable result of unlimited sick days unfortunately.
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.
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.”
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.
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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.
Take your civilised attitude and get out of here!
Although, at least in my field of work, it’s a bit frowned upon to actually get your vacation days back when you get sick.
It really shouldn’t. My company has reprimanded people for not responding their vacation days. The law is very clear on this and courts have stated as well: vacations are meant for recovering your energy. Healing from an illness does not allow you to recover from work, so you must be granted that time again.
Only a refreshed worker is a productive worker.
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.
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.
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!
Look, I’ve never been sick and not been paid for it. And I’ve never had to get a doctor’s note or anything like that. That would be the inevitable result of unlimited sick days unfortunately.
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)
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