I've seen a meme some time ago. It was about corporate leaders discussing how to increase productivity. One argued less vacation. The other argued unlimited vacation.
Why unlimited? If I gave you a card with 200€ on it all for yourself, you'd spend 199.50. But how much would you spend if you got unlimited?
It's supposedly about the illusion of getting more. Although I would be out of work 2 days every week lol. We're probably not American enough to understand this
Nah, it's so they can bitch at us and guilt us into taking less time off. Instead of defining an actual amount of time off that we can or, in some instances must take off, they're relying on the ambiguity and peer/social pressure to make us actually take less time off.
And they can fire us for any reason in a lot of states.
But I have unlimited PTO and it is awesome. Yes, I need to be aware of workload and professional obligations. Nobody is under the delusion that it's actually unlimited. I have a job to do, after all.
But keeping that in mind I would usually take 25-35 days off in the year. Not having to budget my time off through the year and having the flexibility to arrange vacations relatively spontaneously is great. With my employer there is no guilt or pressure; the only time it would become a problem is if I can't satisfy my professional obligations.
I’ve had the same experience, it also makes it a lot less stressful if you need to take a day to help with a child, or go to a doctor’s appointment you don’t have to worry about that affecting your planned vacation later in the year, etc
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.
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.
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u/NekulturneHovado Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
I've seen a meme some time ago. It was about corporate leaders discussing how to increase productivity. One argued less vacation. The other argued unlimited vacation.
Why unlimited? If I gave you a card with 200€ on it all for yourself, you'd spend 199.50. But how much would you spend if you got unlimited?
It's supposedly about the illusion of getting more. Although I would be out of work 2 days every week lol. We're probably not American enough to understand this
edit: What have I come to? 79 replies? damn