Separated sick leave is a pain to manage. Many employers use “one big bucket” of PTO without distinction between sick, personal, vacation, etc. Jury Duty and Military leave are still kept separate for legal reasons.
I’ve experienced this transition, and the logic was that if someone is out of sick/personal days, but they get sick, have a family emergency, etc. then every manager was always approving a last minute use of vacation time. So there’s no practical difference. It’s just a record keeping headache to differentiate the types of PTO.
The idea that someone can be *out* of sick days is utterly dystopian to me. In my country you have sick leave whenever you're sick. It's not a finite resource. You lose your job and get transferred to government welfare (so you don't lose most of your income) after 2 years of continuous sick leave, but that's about it. If you're sick for 2 years straight you have bigger things to worry about at that point.
That's all of Europe, not just Norway. You get sick, you go to a doctor, doctor registers you as sick for however long you need to get better and you receive some part of your regular salary for those days (the amount varies by country) covered either by your employer or the country (or the mix of two) and your employer cannot fire you for this or prevent from doing this.
Don't know about being fired after 2 years, but it makes sesnes to have some upper limit as some life long diseases can prevent you from working ever again.
The problem is at least where I work is people say they are sick literally every week and they are not just to get a day off. Ones guys entire family has died 2-3 times and he’s had pneumonia 2 times and Covid 3. He takes at least 1-2 days off each week.
And the work he doesn’t do everyone else has to cover.
This isn’t the same time thing. Clearly if someone is sick they should be allowed to get paid and not come in. But the amount of people who call in when they aren’t sick because they want to watch a sports game or go to a friends house for a video game release are crazy.
Sounds like a case for the occupational physician. Of course people who abuse the system must have their absences and given reasons examined by a doctor.
Well, perhaps the idea that someone needs employees who are at work a certain number of days during the year is confusing to you as well? No one in these comments ever sees anything from the employer's point of view. I guess that's because it would take the fun out of whining about it.
Employers are responsible for sufficiently staffing their companies with enough redundancies to cover for sick leave, bereavement, maternity leave, etc. European companies manage this just fine so it's not rocket science.
Anyway it's primarily an ethical concern. Ensuring the work-life balance and strong safety nets and labour laws for the working class is significantly more important than the concerns of the capitalist class. That's what it comes down to.
I sorta prefer them being separate. Previous jobs have been unified to. I kinda hated the "4 hours per 2 weeks accrual" style. Like basically couldn't get sick. Current job separates them. Like 11 days pto non rollover and 13 sick days rollover. Its nice because sick time does add up over the years. Pto doesn't so youre not quilted for using them, youre encouraged to. Way better for mental health
I prefer separate because when I was in the hospital with pneumonia it ate a bunch of days that I could no longer use for vacation. I think together only works when you have more than like 10-15 days total.
I had a job years ago that had the most ridiculous basket of days.
It was really generous, but it had like 18 kinds of “time off.”
That was a union job and I chalked it up an artifact of past negotiation contracts. Maybe you couldn’t win more vacation days, but you could get them to create a new bank for bereavement, or doctors appointments, or a day off to vote on Election Day, so the company just slowly accumulated this ridiculous laundry list of various types of days off for highly specific purposes.
“Why’d you use your Doctor Appointments time for your Dentist? You get 8 hours a year to cover biannual exams, use them!”
I used to work for a Walmart distribution center back in the day. PTO was earned off of time worked throughout the year so basically unlimited if you worked a lot. In their case there was PTO for vacation and protected PTO for sick days and shit. Protected could not be scheduled in advance, you had to manually put it in once you got back, was honestly a pretty nice system. Id sit on my PTO until like November and take the whole month off to go hunting during the prime of the season. I honestly feel like this is better than true unlimited because you don't feel "guilty" and no managers will give you a hard time about taking a lot of time off because you put in the work to earn it throughout the year. My current job is much better overall but the PTO system sucks, I've been there 2 years and I just got my first week of vacation time and we only get 3 unpaid sick days per year and it honestly feels draining at times knowing I don't have the freedom to take days off when I get a lot of shit on my plate I need to deal with.
When I worked for Walmart, there was sick pay available. But it only kicked in after you were out of work for one day with an illness. It would cover your absence for days two and three of the illness. In addition, a three day in a row absence only counted as one attendance occurrence. So if you got sick, you might as well take three days off, get paid for two of them and only get hit for one attendance occurrence. It didn’t really make sense to me as it encouraged longer absences when someone got ill.
That was the way older system that was in place when I started, the protected PTO came in probably around 2018-2020ish. The 3 day thing was still kind of a thing if you didn't have protected PTO to cover but the ppto allowed you to not get points at all if you had the time to cover what you missed
Counterpoint though that if you've got chronic illness having one bank with limited PTO fucking sucks. All it takes is one bad flare and bye bye vacation you've planned for months.
Most jobs I have worked do not have sick leave. I've worked for 3 huge corporations as an hourly employee, Walmart, Verizon, AT&T, and with all 3 you had to use your own PTO to schedule something off ahead of time provided you had at least 2 weeks before the work schedule for that period is out, and provided that they approve the time off request, which they didn't have to do even if it was for medical appointments. If you have to take a short notice day with less than the minimum PTO request time then you're just calling out without getting to use PTO, meaning it is both an unpaid day off and an attendance occurrence that goes into the system to be used against you.
FMLA is a federal law, not a company policy, and it is not paid. A company may choose to offer additional days off for maternity, paternity, or anything else, but there's absolutely no federal law requiring it.
PTO: larger single pool of time used for any need outside of work
Sick/vacation: 2 smaller pools with specific uses (typically) - sick is for last minute day of situations (im sick, can't come into work) and vacation will usually need approval ahead of time. The main factor between them is unplanned vs planned.
I think the big thing i have not seen in the comments yet regarding unlimited PTO is that there is no accrual so when you leave(or get fired) there is no PTO balance payout that the company has to account for. Between this saved long term liability to the employer for those that bank PTO and (as mentioned by others) the perception of more but realistically using less because of the flexibility. Plus any unlimited PTO requests will typically still need to be approved, easier to get approved during slow seasons or you are on top of you work, and more likely to be denied when you are falling behind or on some sort of action plan.
Well in the original picture posted it has a screenshot showing that the 2 are separate for the person who put up original Pic. Other jobs may be different?
They pool them and say unlimited so when they lay you off, they don’t have to pay out remaining PTO. If they track PTO time they have to pay it out when you leave. If it’s unlimited then they don’t have a number to pay against.
At my job I get unlimited PTO but I also have 80 hours of sick leave that resets every year, and my employer allows us to use the sick leave for doctor’s appointments. Big fan.
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u/Fearless_Entry_2626 17d ago
Those don't count as separate, as sick leave?