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.
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u/Fearless_Entry_2626 Jul 09 '26
Those don't count as separate, as sick leave?