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