Along the same lines on sick days, I think it should be forbidden for employers to merge vacation days and sick days into "PTO". Merging the pools gives an incentive for people to come to work while ill. For example, suppose somebody has 3 PTO days remaining for the year, and they are all earmarked for Christmas vacation with family. If that person catches the flu in early December, their options are (a) cancel Christmas plans with family or (b) go to the office anyways.
The two pools must be kept separate as a public health measure. To do anything else gives a massive incentive to be a vector for illness.
Even better: Sick days shouldn't be a pool at all.
In Norway there's X amount of sick days one can use without any hassle (all paid), to use any more all you have to do is show a doctors note. If you have to use more than Y amount of days (chronic illness, a more serious thing or something), the government will temporarily take on the responsibility of paying the worker's wages. I don't think people should be punished for being sick.
Absolutely agreed, and that sounds like a reasonable solution all around. Having a pool of sick days leads to the same situation, just with different circumstances. (e.g. Somebody who has a planned surgery for long-term health issues needing to save up sick days to use for the recovery.)
> Somebody who has a planned surgery for long-term health issues needing to save up sick days to use for the recovery
I don't want to be "that guy" but Jeez Louise does this sound like total dystopia when viewed from the outside. What would happen if you didn't have sick days saved?
Nearly all lower income employees in the US don’t have sick days, or any paid time if they don’t come to work. If they aren’t working, they aren’t getting paid.
Additionally, they are not qualified for unemployment benefits if they are fired due to it being the employee’s fault they could not work.
Do people pretend to be sick to use up their X days? Many people want to have as many days off as they can. If so, you could be in the same situation, call in saying your sick to use all your days then really get sick at the end of the year.
If the answer is no, perhaps that is due to cultural differences. It's my impression that folks in Norway are more responsible in many regards compared to Americans.
The difference is probably at least partially cultural, but probably not due to some kind of a single factor such as "responsibility".
I'm not from Norway, but other European countries also have systems that are more or less similar.
Where I live, I think most adults would find it socially rather unacceptable to abuse a sick leave, at least on a regular or systematic basis. Getting caught would be rather embarrassing. So there's a social stigma against abusing the system. (That's probably not true of everyone, and there's always somebody abusing the system, but I believe the majority would find it socially unacceptable.)
Another related difference might be that at least in Nordic countries, people place more trust in the system, and the balance between collectivism and individualism tends more towards the former. If the system is seen as more trustworthy and as more of a mutual thing, as opposed to something that everybody's trying to game anyway, cheating the system is then also less acceptable. It would be like stealing from a common coffer. (Of course not everybody sees it that way, but I think there's more of a tendency towards that in the culture. And practically nobody who's not entirely naive trusts the system unconditionally, nor should they. But many ways of gaming the system for your own benefit are less acceptable to most people than they might be in a different culture.)
My go to answer to questions like this is pretty simple.
We shouldn’t punish the majority for the indiscretions of the few.
Ultimately some people will abuse sick leave, just like everything else in life. But those individuals should be dealt with on a individual basis.
Otherwise you just end up treating everyone like a criminal, at which point for an individual there’s no advantage to not engaging in abusive behaviour. You’re already effectively being punished for potential abusive behaviour, might as well make the most of it and actually engage in the abusive behaviour you’re being punished for.
Who are we punishing here, though? If we gave everyone all their days off in one pool then all the days could be used. Having the extra rules about sick vs personal just benefits the company. EDIT: I guess we are saying that the company benefits if you are not sick, and the healthy people don't get more days off than sick people.
For people who would have trouble managing their time, like an illness late in the year, just allow a bunch of days to be rolled over to be used before the end of the next year.
But it's not a pool of sick days + personal days, with the "sick" days only available to you if you are sick. I imagine the situation in Norway is pretty similar to that in Netherlands, where if you're sick, you're sick- and beyond a certain point you are obliged to consult a doctor. Time management plays no role.
I'm not sure if I follow. In some jobs workers are given 20 PTO days to use as sick or vacation as they please. In other jobs workers are give 10 vacation days and 10 sick days.
I was saying that it seems better to have the PTO days to use however you want than sick days that aren't supoosed to be used for non-sickness reasons.
Are you saying that it is normal for people to use the sick days when they are not really sick?
You mention needing to consult a doctor at a certain point. This is not uncommon in the U.S., with the employer wanting a doctor's note after more than two days of absence. (As an aside I always thought that was a burden on the employee, to have to pay for a doctors visit because the employer doesn't trust them. Not as big a deal if the employer would pay for the visit, but they don't. Certainly not a perfect world we live in...)
>In some jobs workers are given 20 PTO days to use as sick or vacation as they please. In other jobs workers are give 10 vacation days and 10 sick days.
That may indeed be the case in the US. In the scenario I'm describing, you only have vacation days. If you are sick, then this is altogether separate from your vacation days. There is no calculation or concept of using your vacation days if you are ill, or calling in sick as some form of vacation when not actually sick...at least not structurally. In some countries, if you are sick on your vacation day you even get your vacation days back!
In what way is it better for the employee to have a fixed pool of days that illness can cut into, compared to having a fixed pool of days that is truly and only yours for vacation (while not sick!)?
Maybe from the employer's perspective, costs are lower. But fortunately these are settled matters of employment regulation in Europe, and workers' well-being has been a focus.
>have to pay for a doctors visit
Indeed it's not a perfect world...no one has to pay for this in Europe.
> In some jobs workers are given 20 PTO days to use as sick or vacation as they please. In other jobs workers are give 10 vacation days and 10 sick days.
To compare, this is how I have it, in Slovakia:
* 35 days paid vacation -- by law
* sick days as much as needed, with doctor's note -- by law
* 6 sick days without doctor's note -- company benefit
There is a limit for the extra sick days, that you can't take more than 2 in a row. You usually take them if you hope that the sickness will be over in a day or two, for example if you get a cold on Friday; or if for some reason you do not want to visit the doctor during the first day of sickness, perhaps because that's when you feel worst.
When companies require a doctor's note for any and all sick leaves, people will use the maximum amount the doctor prescribes (usually they just slap 3 days on for every sniffle).
On the other hand when people can take a handful (1-5) sick days freely, they tend to use just the bare minimum.
It's a matter of trust. The company is communicating to the employees that it trusts them to take the appropriate amount of sick days and conversely people don't abuse the trust.
I think you nailed it. When a company stands behind "process", well, they shouldn't be surprised when employees do the same.
At one of my earliest jobs, I would take a short lunch at my desk (I was very young and didn't know better). Management decided that they wanted to gauge how long I was lunching for, and insisted that I clock in and out for lunch. Well, you can be sure that I took the full time allotted to me after that.
> “... folks in Norway are more responsible in many regards compared to Americans.”
Which is cause and which is consequence? Maybe Norwegians are more responsible at work because employers don’t exploit them so openly and the law gives them more protection.
We have tons of labor protections in Croatia and people still try to game the system in any way they can. Labor laws just make this easier. Sick leave is massively abused, even though it requires a doctor to authorize it (but is unlimited). People get their doctor to authorize their fake sick leave. We’re a corrupt society on all levels and in all areas of life. Norway likely isn’t.
Honestly the problem is that its a feedback loop. A trusting culture leads to people being more trustworthy... in the long run. The first company to do it will be taken advantage of. It will take a while for society to then frown on that and apply social pressure which will then in turn unlock more trust etc... but it's a process for sure
That's a pretty sweeping generalization to think that the answer is either "yes" or "no". Of course some people will lie and cheat their way through life, so yes, some people will pretend to be sick in order to use up their X sick days. And yes, we could make it harder to cheat by making rules, such as always requiring a doctor's notice for sick days. Is the problem large enough that you need to prevent people from cheating, or should you make a tradeoff where you allow some people to cheat, in order to reduce epidemics (which are excarcebated by forcing people to go to work sick)? I guess the answer depends on society.
Or simply add some flexibility. The rules are similar in Sweden, with the caveat that if an employer suspects that an employee actually is not sick they can demand a doctor's note which the employer then pays for.
If the note shows that the employee cheated you get a warning. If the action is repeated then a doctor's note can be required from day one.
One weird thing here in Sweden, is that you can take sick leave from your vacation. So if you get the flu during your vacation you can call in sick and not use your vacation days while you are sick. I have never heard of anyone doing this though and I would personally be too embarrassed to use the system in that way.
Historically, when sick and vacation were more typically separate pools, the answer was definitely it depended. It's not hard to find studies showing that Mondays and Fridays saw a disproportionate number (i.e. not just 20%) of single day sick days. And, I'm sure, the pattern wasn't spread evenly across everyone.
Personally, although I've fortunately had much need to take an appreciable number of sick days, I favor them being separate because as others note, especially with a relatively limited pool of PTO days, there's a lot of incentive to work sick.
At this point in the conversation I don't understand why any employee would want them to be separate. Doesn't that just work to the company's benefit? They want you to be there as many days as possible Why wouldn't you want all the sick+personal days to use as you see fit?
> I don't understand why any employee would want them to be separate. Doesn't that just work to the company's benefit? They want you to be there as many days as possible Why wouldn't you want all the sick+personal days to use as you see fit?
If you have a joined pool of 60 PTO days per year, that means more days off than separate pools of 30 vacation days + up to 30 sick days. All else being equal, of course an employee would prefer to have more days off. However, all else would not be equal. The PTO days are a cost to the employer, which means the employer can afford to shell out less in other forms of compensation. Think of the job market as a market where employers compete for employees (and vice versa, but that's tangential to the point here). Employers offer different forms of compensation to employees: salary, bonuses, paid vacation days, etc. If the government suddenly mandated that employers must give all employees more vacation days, then the employers could afford to pay out less in other forms of compensation. Sure, in the short run the employer would pay out more to employees and be less profitable, but over time they would balance out this cost by paying less in other benefits.
In other words, if you take the perspective of an employee with a 5+ year time horizon, the total amount of compensation received from the employer would not be expected to increase as a result of those government-mandated extra vacation days. What would change, however, is the incentive of people to go to work sick and infect others. If sick days cost you money, then you are incentivized to go to work sick. As a result, more people get sick. That would be bad. So from a risk/reward pespective, we have a reward of ~0, and a risk of more sickness.
Point taken, I understand what you're saying and that plays into the mix. My next thought is that having the separate sick days with the expectation that people will only use them when needed introduces several less-than-optimal problems: 1) some employees will lie about being sick, 2) some employers won't trust their employees, interjecting the need for unnecessary dacotr's notes, etc and 3) some employees who follow the rules will resent those who don't.
Everyone getting the same combined amount of day mitigates the above, with the understanding that might be 45 PTO days instead of 30 vacation + 30 sick. This would seem to leave the problem of people who are genuinely sick for longer 15 days, under the 30+30 they'd not be dipping into their vacation days as quickly.
There will always be some number of people who run out of sick days, no matter how many you have. Maybe the policies around short-term disability should be adjusted, and the more drastic situations handled with that (requiring doctor visits, etc).
I'm currently reading "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber, something that rings a lot of bells for me. I'll admit to having an very questioning attitude about workplace culture lately :-)
>Why wouldn't you want all the sick+personal days to use as you see fit?
Another thing that is important to point out is that leave days are sometimes an earned entitlement ultimately paid out to you if not taken, whereas sick leave isn't.
That's a good point. It may also be worth pointing out that's the case with "unlimited" vacation as well. Even if you're not cynical about whether employees will be able to take a reasonable amount in practice, it's certainly the case that nothing needs to be paid out when you leave. Which for someone moving around jobs a fair bit can add up over time.
From what I understand-and perhaps it varies by state-it's just left to the benevolence of your employer whether your accrued vacation days are actually paid out to you or if they just disappear in the US if you for example leave a company or don't use all of them within a certain time.
It's kind of insane to me that they can just be taken away like that.
It may vary by state but it's always been paid out to me as far as I can remember based on three different states. (This type of thing does tend to be state-based law and does seem to be [1].) "Use it or lose it" also is prohibited in a few states although (I'm assuming) all of the others do allow accumulation caps.
The argument for a shared pool from the employee side is "I don't get sick much and, as a shared pool, I almost certainly get more vacation time off than if I had a sick pool and a vacation pool."
However, historically, when the two were commonly separate, the sick time would often actually be a very significant chunk (maybe a month) with the understanding that actually burning through most or all of your sick time would be a rare event because of an operation or whatever.
Just to throw out rough numbers, you might have 4 weeks of a combined PTO pool today. 20 years ago you might have had 3 weeks of vacation time and 4 weeks of sick time.
We have roughly the same regulations in Germany, in my personal experience people do not take advantage by prentending to be sick in any meaningful quantity.
I mean there surely are people out there pushing it to the limit but it's not a problem in general.
As for your point about really getting sick by the end of the year, as long as you have a doctor's note saying you are sick, you can stay at home, no matter how long or often you've been sick before that year. I guess it works similarly in Norway.
A) Take any time off at all because they do not receive sick or vacation time.
B) Take time off because they do not have enough sick or vacation days and require rest from illness or work, but do not have realistic time in which to do either.
This brings about the perception that US workers will "use extra days," when in reality they simply do not have enough to begin with.
I've seen minor abuse from several people, and a few sarcastic "just take a sick day for <thing you want to do during a work day>" but I still think that minor abuse is worth the peace of mind it brings to me as an employee.
Keeping them separate as you mention benefits the company for every day of sick time someone can't justify as a day off for something they'd like to do.
That doesn't make sense to me. It's better and more flexible to have 20 days to use as you want or need. let people roll over some of their unused time and everything is perfect.
It seems your way benefits the company and employees who can't manage their time.
I have merged PTO but generally there’s an expectation that you plan in advance for vacation. So if I’m just having a shitty day even if there’s nothing physically wrong with me I’ll take PTO and say I’m “not feeling great”. Manager has never complained about it, always a “feel better”.
It’s not a lie but then the next day at standup I make sure to say how much better I’m feeling. I strongly suspect all my coworkers do this too.
This ends up being a bigger push, but I would say that it is perfectly reasonable to take a sick day for mental health reasons. Especially in knowledge-based jobs, there's no point in me trying to push for results that will need to be re-checked the next day when in a better spot.
There's also a lot of interplay between mental and physical health. For my part, it is pretty straight-forward, that if I have a more stressful day, I will get a migraine, and need to spend several hours in a dark room. If I feel the edge of a migraine coming on, it is better for me to pre-emptively cancel meetings and take a nap rather than waiting for it to be so bad that I am forced to.
I think in the end, there is no way around trust. You have to trust the mechanic that they tighten the screws correctly. You have to trust the software developer that they write that does what it should and not something nefarious. You have to trust the salesperson that they don't lie to the customer.
Yes, all of these can be checked to some extent, but it will not be possible to fully check everything.
Big companies make seem more into making inflexible processes and eliminating the variability of trust.
The people who do follow the rules are left feeling shorted by those that don't. That doesn't seem right.
I think this happens with a lot of things. The employer can say "be trustworthy" and save money across the entire pool of employees, but the employees who follow the rules have to stand by watching other who break them.
Same thing happened with marking spots in my apartment complex. They numbered the spots to go with apartments, but don't enforce it. Someone always takes my spot. According to their rules I'm supposed to park further away in the unmarked spots, or steal someone elses spot. Most people follow the rules, so the office gets less parking complaints. But now people whose spots are taken are left worse off than before.
When you said "trust" I wondered who benefits, and my first thought was that the company that doesn't have to deal with the sick days is the winner. The company is trusting to come to work as many days as we physically can?
How is that better than just giving everyone the same number of days to manager as sick or personal for themselves?
Well, with ten days of vacation per year, I'd be interesting in any additional time I could take off. But if you have enough (say 25), then I as an employee don't feel that I got the short end of the stick.
It's also a matter of solidarity that those who can support those who can't. In this case, the healthier employees support the ones who are ill.
There's many ways the same support can be given. Why should employees have to support each other in that fashion? There's things like short-term disability that handle absences longer than whatever specific number of normal time off is provided.
According to your logic above, why don't we get 100 sick days per year instead of 10? Some people need that many, fellow employees should support them too, right?
I guess the sick vs vacation day thing becomes a more of a problem in an environment where the rule-followers see a lot rule-breakers taking advantage.
In America they definitely do that, especially the less responsibilities the employee has. That's why Netflix or Goldman Sachs can give unlimited time off and its rarely abused. But if Walmart did it, their employees would take off 5 times a month for fake illnesses.
I worked as a unionized grocery clerk and essentially everyone used all their sick time. People (including me) would call off just because they wanted to go to a party or something.
Some places try to avoid this by requiring a doctors note. But that's worse. I worked for a midsize electronics company that had unlimited sick time, but I needed a doctors note for anytime. I literally ralphed in the bathroom mid-day on a friday and HR made me go to the doctor on Monday to justify it, even though I was already better.
That policy is crazy because it creates a transaction cost for sick days. If I have a bad cold or stomach virus, might as well go into work than go to the doctor right?
In the country I live in, for some public service employees it's a thing. And yes it's being abused, probably more by those who can't be fired than those with weaker rights. I don't know if it's abused so much that it offsets the balance too much.
> Do people pretend to be sick to use up their X days?
How would one ever know? And what's the issue if someone pretend to be sick if they have up to X days to "be sick". I don't mind at all what my coworkers do with their lives.
Yeah, its almost like by law in Norway, employers have to provide 25 days of paid leave, whereas in the US, people have to behave "irresponsibly" to have a semblance of a normal life, free of work.
Seems like roughly the right solution. Sick days should exist to protect people who are unfortunate enough to get sick. Bad luck shouldn't cost you your pay, your job, or your holiday days.
Sick days should not be a simple pool of days off that you get to treat as equivalent to holiday days. This approach has the effect of (further) rewarding people who are lucky with their health, and incentivises not taking sick days when you should.
Not only that but how many people can get into a doctor the same day for the note? If they get sick on Monday you're potentially forcing someone to choose between unpaid time off, burning a day of PTO, or going into the doctor's office Wednesday or Thursday (if they're lucky) and saying "I feel find but had a cold Monday, can I get a note?" And how to juggle the logistics of that Wed/Thur doctor's visit with work?
I feel like a "sick day pool" or sick days burning PTO is just a shitty way for companies to try to save 0.02% on payroll while simultaneously pissing off the few employees who get burned by the policy. I can honestly say if I had to use PTO for an unexpected illness and it either messed up a vacation or caused me to have some vacation be unpaid, I would leave no matter how happy I was otherwise.
> Not only that but how many people can get into a doctor the same day for the note?
In Finland, where this same system exists, each urban neighborhood has its own local clinic that in large part exists just for this reason: someone feeling ill can call early in the morning, be seen a little later that morning, and get a note that they can show their employer the next day (or whenever they recover).
> Not only that but how many people can get into a doctor the same day for the note?
No, it doesn't work like that in Poland. You can just call it in, saying "I'm sick" and then go to the doctor. Doctor's note can cover up to 3 days before the visit.
I've occasionally been able to get in same day in the US but it's certainly the exception (and I don't live in/near a major metro). A week or more to see a GP wouldn't be uncommon.
Where I live, you can stay at home due to illness for 3 days or so (varies a little) before a doctor's note is required. Often a mild common cold or a diarrhea will ameliorate within a few days.
It still feels stupid every time you get past that threshold and still aren't quite healthy enough for work because the cold is just taking a bit longer this time, and you have to go see a doctor just to get the note.
Usually employers are paying for basic healthcare, so you wouldn't be paying for the doctor's visit yourself. But of course somebody's still paying, and it is a bit of a waste in cases where medical attention would not be actually needed. But it's not like you have to do that every time; you can compromise by trusting people for a couple of days before requiring that. It's all about compromise.
1. Healthcare is government-sponsored, so it costs you nothing
2. There are so called "first-contact doctors", who simply specialize in everyday things like treating common cold, and in more serious cases they would just point you to another, more specialized doctor. Getting appointment on the same or next day is quite easy.
In the UK you'd generally be trusted for 1-2 days.
If you said you were (still) sick for 3+ days you'd need some kind of doctor's note. Though these are easy to receive - the hardest part is usually getting an appointment in a hurry.
That's not true, as far as I know (and only because I looked this up when I worried about it). You get up to and including 7 days and you shouldn't have to give a note. From gov.uk[0]:
>If employees are off work for 7 days or less, they do not need to give their employer a fit note or other proof of sickness from a medical professional.
>When they return to work, their employer can ask them to confirm they’ve been off sick. This is called ‘self-certification’. The employer and employee will agree on how the employee should do this. They might need to fill in a form or send details of their sick leave by email.
Isn't it still a bit of a fiction, you tell the doctor you have $ailment and then they write a note. If it's a bad stomach flu, your likely on the last day of it by the time you see the doctor anyway. The system inherently needs trust.
I think the closest thing in the US is the short term disability in California which gives up to 52 weeks if you are not able to work based on doctors certification and a week waiting period.
I think in practice they are merged to avoid incentives to lie. Every org I have worked at that had separate pools there was widespread lying about being sick.
Nobody really asked or cared, so in effect they are the same thing. In practice lying was incentivized, and managers that didn't want to be lied to just adopted the policy that your sick days were yours to take for any reason.
I don't think this is something that should be legislated. It's really far down on the list to address.
This is why I think a better system is 1) employees get n hours of PTO; 2) sick days don't use PTO; 3) sick days are not explicitly tracked or counted.
If you're not completing enough work because you're abusing pseudo-unlimited-PTO-via-sick-days, or you magically get a cold every Friday before a week off, that gets handled by your manager directly. But it doesn't make sense to penalize the 99% of employees who are responsible and honest.
> If you're not completing enough work because you're abusing pseudo-unlimited-PTO-via-sick-days, or you magically get a cold every Friday before a week off, that gets handled by your manager directly. But it doesn't make sense to penalize the 99% of employees who are responsible and honest.
this just sounds like a shitty situation all around. it really sucks to suspect someone / be suspected of something that can't be conclusively proven one way or the other. if you can be fired for being sick too often at convenient times, you don't really have unlimited sick leave in practice.
I think I just didn't explain it well enough. A common refrain against unlimited/untracked sick time is that employees will abuse it to be lazy, and the only way to fix that is to either closely monitor/track sick days used, or have a pool.
My point was that if performance is an issue there are ways to address that. And if enough work is getting completed, it doesn't matter how many sick days were taken (so no need to track/have a pool).
I share your shock, and try to keep myself from feeling that the current situation in the US is either normal or ethical. To answer your question, yes, recovery from cancer would could from the pool of sick days in most places in the US. If the recovery takes more than the pool of sick days (7-9 days per year, somehow and perversely being different on average by seniority[0]), then all remaining recovery time is unpaid.
Sick days are meant to be used for recovery from minor illness, not for cancer. This is why short- and long-term disability insurance exist, which pay your full salary or close to it. For example my employer pays for everyone to have ST and LT coverage up to 60 or 80% of salary (I forget which honestly) and you can purchase additional coverage which is (I think) pretax to bring that up to 100% for one or both. For example I have the partial coverage for ST but pay something like $15/mo for 100% on the LT if something were to happen to me requiring extended care. And every job I've ever had from six-figure consultant to $6.15/hr dishwasher has offered STD/LTD insurance (of varying quality, of course).
It's not nearly as barbaric as you're making it sound if you actually understand how it's supposed to used.
Only 20% of service workers have disability insurance, and I don't know of any fast food franchisee or hotel franchisee or pretty much any other small business that offers disability insurance. I would say it's still pretty barbaric. The lower your pay, the lower your benefits.
At least for any job I've had in the US (middle class), one of your benefits is disability insurance (which the employer usually covers 100% of premiums) which pays you 60% of your salary if you can't work.
Only 1/3rd of non government employees have short term disability insurance. If you're a white collar office employee, you maybe have a 50% chance of having short term disability insurance, with the higher you get paid, the more likely you have it.
But for the people that need it the most, lower paid service workers, only 20% have it.
The thing is that sickdays (like healthcare) just sholdn't be a concern of the employer at all.
When I'm sick, an insurance pays me. My employer doesn't. This insurance happens to be public/tax-funded, which is nice.
I don't expect my employer to pay me when I'm not working because I'm sick. Why would they? That would create bizarre incentives to push people to work when they are ill.
My employer pays me during my 5-6w paid time off, that's it. That's vacation. Whether was sick for 0 or 50 days that year doesn't matter.
My company doesn't have separate sick days, but you are given 5 days (40 hours) of "personal days" that are independent of your PTO. This seems like a decent compromise in the sense that I can use them as PTO without doing the "pretend to be sick" thing. These do not roll over or accumulate, so they are always the first days of "PTO" used, but they are independent of any tenure or other PTO.
In practice, people can usually go into "debt." But the shared pool still encourages people to work sick rather than use what's effectively a vacation day.
On the other side of it, it's nice to get the time off even if you don't get sick. Companies will tend to argue that sick time is only for when you are sick.
> Companies will tend to argue that sick time is only for when you are sick.
To me this somehow... makese sense? Of course a burnout counts as sick time, but for just getting "time off" there's vacation days, which are (in Europe) mandatory. Mandatory as in "your contract grants you at least X days off" and often "you need to take at least X-Y days off in one year"
Context is king. We are talking about banning lumped PTO. Pretty much every company moving from lumped PTO to vacation+sick is going to make vacation smaller than the lumped PTO.
Most companies are going to use any change in leave policies to decrease total leave, if they're allowed to do so. This happened when pooled PTO became common as well - moving from, say, 10 days vacation and 10 days sick leave to 15 days PTO.
Not disputing that there are shitty companies out there, but I worked somewhere that did this exact thing (10+10 to 15) but it was explicitly said that sick days don't burn PTO. If you're sick you don't work, paid, and if it's more than 2 days in a row you need a note. Basically, treating the employees like adults.
If more companies did that people would be happier and more productive across the board.
I'm fine with that, so long as there is also a reasonable amount of vacation time. The US really needs to get with the times and have basic workers' rights. Currently, the average number of vacation days per year in the US (17 days), is less than the statutory minimum number of days in many countries.
Besides United States, Papua New Guinea and Suriname also do not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents.
So US isn´t the only country in the world that doesn´t have paid parental leave. Its one of the three countries in the world.
However, it doesn’t separate for yourself and someone else, so technically a mother could be on bed rest for 3 months and exhaust all of her leave.
A small number of states do mandate paid family leave (specifically to care for someone else which includes new parents), but they also usually stipulate minimum number of employees at businesses.
It definitely doesn’t behoove a young person interested in becoming a parent at some point to work at a startup or small business unless they explicitly offer paid parental leave as a benefit.
Part of the reason my wife and I moved to the state we did was so that she can get an extra two months of leave with her newborn, and so our daughter would be growing up in state that offered them at least that much in the future.
After taking a look at some other companies, I realized it’s pretty cushy having 26 days of PTO per year at a US company. When recruiters come knocking I point out that I don’t want to lose PTO days, and won’t consider positions where I’d have a reduction. Most of them don’t message me back.
Part time employees pretty much don't get any vacation, so I doubt that is the real average (the article says 15, which still probably isn't the real average). BLS says ~16 for full time, so there you go: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
That's also a hell of a 'so long as'. If you ban lumped PTO and don't establish a robust minimum, lots of people aren't going to get what they would prefer.
Because if so, they don't count in the US. So the US would be 17 days of vacation plus statutory holidays. At my job I get 25 days off, plus 13 statutory holidays, so 38 days a year off, paid.
Most everyone in the US that does not work in an office setting do not get paid for government holidays that they do not work. For example, at stores, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, hotels, etc.
And there is no legal requirement to pay anyone for any government holiday that they do not work either. Many times, the people that do work on government holidays also do not get paid any extra for working on a holiday.
Does the US not have guaranteed vacation days? Here in Australia all non-casual workers must be given 20 days off a year (which in my view is actually too little -- in Europe workers get even more guaranteed days off).
EDIT: This doesn't count public holidays, we have 10 or so public holidays (depending on your state) in addition to your vacation days.
I don't think the EU and US count them the same. It looks like the EU minimum includes banks holidays? Where US vacation days don't include them.
"By law, every country in the European Union has at least four work weeks of paid vacation. Austria, which guarantees workers the most time off, has a legal minimum of 22 paid vacation days and 13 paid holidays each year."
So the US has no minimum, but the minimum offered is typically 10 days and the a middle class job 15 days. On top of that you get at least 10 federal holidays off (or you get paid 2x if you work). Many companies recognize 13+ "official days off".
So most US employees (there are exceptions) get ~20 days off a year, while for middle class it's more typical to get closer to 25-30. (15 + 13)
The EU minimum does not include bank holidays. The UK in practice has 20 vacation days (matching the EU minimum) plus 8 public holidays. It's just that the law is written that 28 days is the minimum including the 8 public holidays. The net effect is the same.
And by that metric, all Australian employees (excluding casual workers) get at least 32 days off a year (20 vacation days, plus 12 or more public holidays). The UK has 28, but that's because they have fewer public holidays. Seems like the US is still behind on time off, especially since none of your vacation time is actually guaranteed by law. I hope the situation improves over there.
The "at will" work concept (where employees can be fired without notice or compensation) is also very strange to me. That's not legal here.
The number of people working minimum wage jobs saying they get zero PTO in the US is astounding.
Intra-EU immigrants, for example, are quite often treated like second rate workers. Maximum work for minimum pay. Come in at 9pm, stay for 2 hours, we need you for an emergency, 20 Yoyos in your pocket, yeah? That kind of thing.
If not for the laws, we'd be treated like disposable trash.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find 10 days as a software developer. Every place seems to advertise 15 and 20 is becoming more common, especially if you ask for it during the interview process.
Germany is 20 days (on a 5 workdays week) as well. The law stipulates 24 days, so you see that number quoted a lot, but the law also assumes a 6 day work week.
I was thinking of the likes of France, Finland, Sweden, and so on which get 5 weeks, but yeah it seems the EU only requires a minimum of 4 weeks paid leave.
at a reasonable company, the person in your example would be allowed to accrue negative PTO to go on vacation with their family.
there are pros and cons to merged time off. psychologically, it sucks to burn "vacation" to take time off to recover from an illness. on the flip side, there is no reason for my manager to suspect me of abusing sick leave or verify my illness (which sounds super draconian). if I'm not feeling well, it's just a quick slack message and then I go back to drinking tea with lemon. also, unused PTO is usually paid out when you leave the company in the private sector. sick leave, AFAIK, is usually not.
there's definitely something to your public health argument, but as an individual it's hard to see why I would ever prefer x PTO + y sick leave over (x + y) PTO.
In this particular trade-off, yes, you could go into negative PTO for a particular vacation. However, it is still trading a future vacation day away.
I don't think there should be any verification for minor illnesses. My company has an unlimited sick leave policy, and I've never needed to do more than send a quick "I'm not feeling well, should be back tomorrow." email. One of the other commenters mentioned Norway's system of having a doctor's note only after X sick days have been used, which seems reasonable.
Agreed that (x+y) PTO is individually preferable to (x vacation) + (y sick leave). That said, as thaeli mentioned, usually it isn't a summation. In moving from a standard of (10 vacation) + (10 sick leave) to a merged pool, the result was a standard of (15 PTO) rather than 20. That there isn't an individual push for the separation is also why it needs to be a regulation, rather than something left to the free market, because there is definitely a public health argument on it.
> I don't think there should be any verification for minor illnesses. My company has an unlimited sick leave policy, and I've never needed to do more than send a quick "I'm not feeling well, should be back tomorrow." email. One of the other commenters mentioned Norway's system of having a doctor's note only after X sick days have been used, which seems reasonable.
I'm sure there are reasonable companies that make pretty much any legal arrangement work well for the employees. but I'm an anxious person, so I can't help imagining the worst possible interpretation of my actions. I feel much more comfortable taking PTO than sick leave, even though I have a trusting manager.
I understand that different people have different needs/desires regarding time off, but I personally don't take it very often. I'm glad that I can choose employment where this results in me walking away with a fairly large check at the end. I would be very much opposed to any regulation that takes this away, though I could certainly support a law that requires employers to offer a choice between merged and separate.
I disagree with your assessment in the strongest terms as I have personally experienced them being separate as achieving the opposite most of my 15 year career.
Places I had worked including my current employer, vacation days need to be scheduled at least a week+ in advance. As a person who gets sick a lot I almost always end up having to take unpaid days off when I’m sick because I blew though my 3-5 sick days.
Places with PTO I can take my entire pool off as sick time. Never took an unpaid day at a PTO business.
Right now. I have 400+ hours of banked vacation time, but I have used all of my sick days for the year. If I get sick I have to take it unpaid or work. It doesn’t make any sense.
Honestly I think they should outlaw having them separate.
There should not be a hard limit on sick days - that's how it works in many countries. If you are sick for too long it might not be your employer that pays, but you should never be cheated out of your vacation for it. Even if you get sick during your vacation, you get those vacation days back here.
It sounds like the problem is in having such a small pool of sick days, not in the concept of separation. By no fault of your own, by getting sick more often, you are forced to give up income (current situation) or to give up your vacation (merged PTO). Neither of those is an acceptable situation, and the solution is to have more reasonable sick leave policies.
I'm pretty sure the people ITT are going to disagree with me, but vacation is a luxury, sick days are a necessity. If I missed weeks of work I wouldn't also take a vacation that year regardless.
In many places (Europe, generally?), vacation days are earned. At least in the Netherlands if you were absent for weeks due to illness (for which there is no fixed pool of days), and decided not to take any vacation days, you'd either have some of your vacation days rolled over to the next year or they'd be paid out to you with salary and taxed.
It's not a luxury in the slightest. You'd have earned them just as you earned your wages.
How's it in Netherlands in case of long term sickness? In Czech Republic we have the time off accrued based on worked hours. If you are out sick 2 weeks, you don't earn holiday time for these days. So instead of they yearly 25 days off you'll only have 24.
But parental leave is considered as work, so if you come back after your parental leave, you have your full amount.
Interesting axiomatic basis for your argument, and thank you for explaining where we are seeing differences. You are correct that I would disagree with you on that, and place both as necessities. Sick days are necessary for short-term physical and mental health. Vacation days are necessary for long-term mental health.
If you missed weeks of work from an illness, those weeks aren't time where you could see family, see the world, relax, and be human. They don't satisfy the same long-term needs as fully-disconnected vacation time satisfies.
See, this just tells me that 3-5 sick days is completely inadequate. I've been fortunate to generally have virtually unlimited sick days, and I very much prefer that to having to use up my limited vacation days.
It does point out that they'd need to enforce a reasonable minimum number of sick days if they're forcing them to be separate from PTO.
From a perspective of many other places of the world, the idea that you can "use up" your sick days if you are actually sick just doesn't make any sense. So the unspoken assumption is "sick days shouldn't cut into your vacation, and obviously sick days are effectively unlimited"
The two pools must be kept separate as a public health measure. To do anything else gives a massive incentive to be a vector for illness.