As a German I find the concept of “allotted sick days” disturbing.
What if I told you that it usually also takes away from your vacation days?
So if you get sick too often, no vacation for you that year.
That’s sick (pun intended). Over here it’s the other way around: When we get sick during a vacation, we get the vacation days back.
Take your civilised attitude and get out of here!
Although, at least in my field of work, it’s a bit frowned upon to actually get your vacation days back when you get sick.
It really shouldn’t. My company has reprimanded people for not responding their vacation days. The law is very clear on this and courts have stated as well: vacations are meant for recovering your energy. Healing from an illness does not allow you to recover from work, so you must be granted that time again.
Only a refreshed worker is a productive worker.
My sick days and PTO are the same. I have a chronic illness I’m working with doctors to treat. Between occasional sick days, and doctors visits, I never get a vacation day
That really sucks. I’ve never had a job where they separated PTO and sick days. They just pool them together.
Damn, the US needs to get their shit together
How inconsiderate of you, think of the billionaires who would suffer!
I’ve been lucky enough to always have a job in the public sector and it’s very common they are completely separate. Likely less pay, but far better retirement system than most private sector jobs.
I’ve worked at companies that do both. There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
The worst of all is so called unlimited PTO.
There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
I get why you consider “getting more money” a pro, but in my book any financial incentive to avoid taking a sick day when you are actually sick and instead try to power through and infect everyone in the office should be considered as con.
Well I’ve worked at a few places where they’ve transitioned between the two methods. They just end up taking your vacation days + sick days and calling it PTO. So you end up with the same number of days off but a bit of flexibility on how to use them. If you have a great year and don’t get sick, that’s 5 to 10 more days you can take off without pretending you are sick. I don’t see a big difference if my 36 days comes out of 1 bucket or two.
Also, a lot of places don’t have caps on sick days so if you don’t use them in a year, you can carry forward into the next year.
Very few places will give unlimited sick days.
So you end up with the same number of days off but a bit of flexibility on how to use them.
That’s the problem - sick days should not have a “flexibility” aspect to them. You take them when you are sick, so that you can heal and so that you can avoid infecting other people.
Since you don’t have a choice about being sick, ideally there shouldn’t be a choice about whether or not you take a sick day - but realistically this can’t be tightly enforced (at least not with reasonable measures), that it ends up relying on good will, and that there will always be incentives to fake sickness in order to take sick days and incentives to ignore sickness and still go to work (and these incentives don’t balance each other out - they incentivize different people differently, widening the gap of unfairness)
But still - even if you accept that real life have such deficiencies - this does not mean one should create policies that make them even more deficient!
That’s not the case in the UK, your annual leave is a legal entitlement, and unrelated to any sick time you may have to take.
The workers of your nation need to organise a few general strikes to get their basic rights sorted out, I don’t like seeing workers abused.
Jokes on you, I haven’t been able to afford a vacation in a decade 😂😭
What if I told you merging PTO with sick days was to get around the Federal requirement for employers to not use your use of sick days against you. By eliminating sick days and rolling them all into one pool, they now can use being sick as an excuse to fire you.
Haben wir bei uns auch, nur dass es natürlich deutlich mehr Tage sind
I had a coworker whose kids got sick back to back and then his wife, and then he got ill too. By March, he had no PTO and had to cancel his vacation that summer. He was worn the fuck out come summer. I think he was able to flex to work “four tens” here and there, but it sucks that “sick” and “vacation” are not only the same bucket, but could get you punished.
As a European I can’t grasp this concept. As if sickness is something somebody chooses by will.
No, sickness is not a choice, but staying at home to recover IS a choice.
Just came in to work, projectile vomited everywhere then passed out on the floor. Bonus if you could pull off a seizure.
It’s only professional ethics to bring whatever bug you have and share it with colleagues.
Sharing is caring.
Wait I thought sharing is communist—
(promptly gets blasted with a cloud of water droplets carrying some rhinovirus)
In this situaution, wouldn’t you be worried about incurring medical costs if someone called for help?
Which also is NOT a worry in Europe. In some countries the worst that can happen if you ask for an ambulance that was completely a waste of time is getting fined about 30 euros. Worst outcome I had from visiting A&E was to have to pay for the prescribed antibiotics.
Where I work, I get 5 days worth of PTO which can be used for either sick time or vacation time. It takes (8) 40 hour weeks to generate 1 new PTO day. We’re not allowed to take unpaid time off, you’re required to use your PTO. If you do not have any PTO left, you go up to 40 hours negative. You are then required to work 40 weeks to break out of the negative. If you decide to quit or are fired while in the negative, that hourly difference is deducted from your last paycheck.
It didn’t used to be this way. The family owned company I work for was bought out by a 500 million dollar corporation.
Shits fucked yo.
There’s no way them deducting pay out of your last paycheck is legal in any way. How hasn’t soneone sued the hell out of them?
This is the American mindset via a comment my previous boss made: “We’ve closed the shop due to heavy snow conditions, it’s not my fault it snowed so you need to use your own vacation time if you want to get paid.”
Same reasoning for illness: “it’s not my fault you got sick so why should I lose anything?” (they see loss of productivity as a punishment they don’t deserve)
(Sorry if you end up with 3 of these, my phone or Lemmy is being dumb trying to send this…)
I’ve worked at companies where sick days are part of PTO and others where sick days are separate. In the past 2 years, I’ve had 1 with pti covering it all and 2 with separate vacation and sick accruals.
Having “an amount” of sick days is absurd. I may get sick or not. If I have an amount, I may even be compelled to reach it.
Of course we always use all our sick days. Its a game and I’m only commenting on how its typically done.
Is this one of those comics where you have to laugh otherwise you’d cry because it’s so true?
I’m so glad for the German worker’s rights. I practically can’t be fired for being sick.
In fact you can’t be fired at all (in the sense of "leave immediately and we won’t pay you anymore“) unless you really fuck up (like, assault your superior or something along those lines).
But that doesn’t make sense even in capitalist mindset. Finding another specialist is going to take time and resources. Plus, this is apparently a very good employee, already tested. The new one will likely be not as good if this one is perfect.
I understand that this comic is a hyperbole, but seems like firing people over using their sick leave is financially detrimental.
Yeah, but the new guy’s gonna be cheaper than the one with experience!
I mean, think about the next quarter benefits! Stop searching for stuff like ‘reliability’ or ‘long term’. That doesn’t mean anything to the shareholders who’ll jump ship the next month.
(It’s definitely an hyperbole, but it does raise a good point over hyper short-termism leading to mass layoffs for ‘profitability’. The sick days are just the excuse needed to part the employes that will support their hyper toxic management structures from the ones who aren’t ‘team players’)
Onboarding a new employee is incredibly expensive. I think the stat is that it takes on average 6 months for the company to break even for the hiring costs. That’s what I’ve read through. No idea how true it is
It’s very true!
Six months is the most conservative estimate I’ve heard. There’s some specialties where it’s closer to 24 months.
But the boss’ bonus will have arrived in their account, before then. And with a little luck, the next company wide reorganization will make it someone else’s problem.
It doesn’t make sense but it happens constantly, especially in low-level environments Where Heads Are a dime a dozen, it’s usually not straight out being terminated however it’s done in the case of yeah you did everything perfectly but we can’t financially afford to give you a higher rating than average. Which does more or less the same thing cuz it tells the employee well it’s time to go elsewhere so they’re going to be doing training costs anyway
companies do this kind of stuff everywhere. for me thats usually the time to work less and pretend i’m working more.
It most definitely is, and it is such an idiotic mindset when actual number crunching happens.
Employee A: Been here for a year (due to getting a performance review in the comic), already trained, already knows much about the system and environment, apparently perfect Gets fired for using a sick day
Employee B: newly hired (since we fired the last guy), needs to be trained (as each work environment can be totally different even in the same field), knows next to nothing about the work flow or systems or environment, might be perfect but we won’t know for sure until next year or until they mess something up really bad Loss of money on training someone for a role that used to be filled by a person who was already engrained into the work
= a really fucking dumb way of looking at how you handle management
The new person could also use EVEN MORE sick days or whatever. Just…? Brain… are you there…?
cries in working parent
My employer gives us 8 sick days a year. When we run out of those we are supposed to use vacation time. It’s downright depressing how fast we blow through the sick time in a bad winter season.
I’m very very lucky to work from home, so I can neglect my sick kid at home while getting work done and thus avoid having to burn through my vacation time as well. Others aren’t so lucky.
This is pretty much illegal in most European countries btw. But not all countries assure sick children time off.
Actually I’ve read studies saying people who took their full PTO tended to get better year over year raises.
I would like to see how they handled companies that have “unlimited” PTO.
unlimited is a scam, people tend to take fewer days when you tell them it is unlimited comparatively as when they have a fixed number of days. I know, I did the same. Now I take care of consuming my allowed PTO entirely and I take a lot more days off than before.
Living that now. Unlimited PTO sounds great, but the reality is that your days off ARE being tallied, and they WILL be used against you for the purposes of denying raises, lowering bonuses, or withholding promotions. It’s up to you to police your own usage of it, because your managers will basically give you all the rope you’d like to hang yourself with.
Is PAID Time Off ever unlimited?
Yeah, it’s a real thing at some companies.
You have to guess how much you can get away with?
It becomes a negotiation every time you want to use it. It’s terrible unless you’re good at haggling over your own wellbeing.
Exactly. If a company tells me that I get unlimited time off then tell me when the Christmas party is because I’m on PTO until then.
My current job has unlimited PTO, but it’s not called unlimited. It’s called “discretionary” time off. And I think that’s an OK term for it. You don’t have a limit to your vacation/sick days, but you have to be a professional about it and not let things fall apart at work.
I’m fortunate in that we mostly work as a team and treat each other as human beings, even including the project manager and our direct management. So it can be alright at a good place. For example, we were asked our vacation plans for the quarter and I decided to add an extra day to a decent short break, and I gave myself a week long staycation next month.
But no limit also means no minimum, so of course the shittier places will use it to make things worse.
This might be confusing cause and effect. People who feel more secure in their jobs are more comfortable taking time off.
I don’t think there’s ever been a bad Mr. Lovenstein strip.
![Performance Review [Mr. Lovenstein]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d0e1dd89-f03c-40f6-bc8e-2b4ae8519d74.png){kind=link}