Sick Leave/ Extended Illness Bank question and Mandatory Vacation Payout?

[MossRoad]

A couple years ago they took away all sick and vacation time and lumped it into Paid Time Off (PTO) and said use it or lose it. They said is was due to abuse of sick time. So, if you had 4 weeks of vacation, they put your three sick days on and now you have 23 days of PTO. So, everyone scheduled their one or two weeks of summer vacation and piled the rest at the end of the year on the schedule, so it wouldn't be lost. If they got sick, they'd just take a day off the end of the year and use it for sick. So you have everyone scheduled to take off the last two weeks of the year, and there is no seniority policy anymore (because young job-hopping ladder-climbing supervisors don't think its fair that old dependable folks should get the holidays off every year), so the supervisors tell you who gets to take the time off arbitrarily. Makes for bad blood between coworkers if they have to work several holidays in a row. Anyhow, PTO only benefits the company because people will forget to schedule it and will lose it. The company loses nothing financially if they pay someone to be here or on vacation, but the company gains a day of a body in the plant.... doing highly motivated work of course!

 

[300UGUY]

We went thru a similar thing, all our sick days were lumped together with our vacation. We used to have a week of Pto days we could take at random. But they got merged into vacation, and yet our vacation days didn't increase. We never were allowed to acumulate pto, for salary it was use it or lose it, for hourly you got you vacation check, whether you took the days off or not. As attrition reduced the number of employees, management got tighter on letting folks off.

Maybe you should look into another job, or offer to quit and come back as a contractor. Sounds like you are almost self employed at this point, in all but name.

 

[jinman]

A couple years ago they took away all sick and vacation time and lumped it into Paid Time Off (PTO) and said use it or lose it. They said is was due to abuse of sick time.

I've had people who work for me who used every second of sick time and vacation time each year. To them, sick time was just more vacation time. In my opinion, sick time policies need to be changed from the old standards of giving so many days per year. However, I do believe that permanent booked sick days should be awarded to protect long-term employees who have had loyal service to their company. I'd be for any method that prevented abuse by malingerers and protected long-term employees. I also agree with "use it or lose it" vacation policies if the maximum carry-over is reasonable and enough notice is given for employees to plan and take their excess days.

 

[MossRoad]

I've had people who work for me who used every second of sick time and vacation time each year. To them, sick time was just more vacation time. In my opinion, sick time policies need to be changed from the old standards of giving so many days per year. However, I do believe that permanent booked sick days should be awarded to protect long-term employees who have had loyal service to their company. I'd be for any method that prevented abuse by malingerers and protected long-term employees. I also agree with "use it or lose it" vacation policies if the maximum carry-over is reasonable and enough notice is given for employees to plan and take their excess days.

We have no carry over. If you don't use it all by December 31st, its gone. For that matter, if you use all of your PTO time before the end of the year, and then get sick, guess what? They take it from next years PTO days. So, lets say you have two weeks (10 days) of PTO. You take one week in the summer with your family and another couple days at Thanksgiving and three before Christmas.... Its all used now. Grandkids visit at Christmas and one sneezes on you and you go down with flu for three days between Christmas and New Years. You only get 7 days next year. Ebenezer would be proud. :thumbdown:

 

[MossRoad]

I will agree with you about people abusing sick days, though. 100%. I have friends that will call in sick to remodel their bathroom. That's just wrong.

 

[ultrarunner]

I've always thought our sick time to be odd...

In order to access, an employee first needs to have earned some, then, they must first use 3 vacation days and finally a doctor note with return to work must be submitted.

It took years for me to get the maximum 480 hours... in 23 years have never taken a single sick day.

Company department head meeting today... will see what transpires.

 

[MossRoad]

Doctor's note.... a rotten manager here once told an employee if they were well enough to go to the doctor to get a note they were well enough to come to work! What a slug.

 

[dmccarty]

Many employers, private or government are boiling the frogs aka the employees. At some point, the benefit cuts, pay cuts, and doing more with less, hurt the organization with bad morale and productivity. Eventually, people will leave. Organizations can get away with this nonsense in a bad economy but eventually, I hope, the economy will improve, and you will not want to be blocking the exits at these places. You might get run over by the stampede.

Last year I tried to take a bunch of vacation time but could not because of work. Officially, if I don't use the vacation days, I loose them though management has some flexibility. I rolled over a few days into 2014 which I will take ASAP. To only roll over a few days I was on vacation for four weeks over XMAS. Sorta. I still had to work a half day a week to check on critical issues but that is not bad.

At some point, Ultrarunner will get tired of being boiled like a frog and hop out of the pot. A that point it seems that the hospital will learn, the hard way, how valuable and CHEAP it was to retain Ultrarunner...

My pot has been boiling for a few years as well. Tis only a question if I will hop from the pot or will they dump me out of the pot... And when.

Later,
Dan

 

[ultrarunner]

With every change I step back and come to the decision to make the best of it.

I realize I am fortunate in that my life would change very little if I found myself unemployed because I would simply go back to being self employed.

The changes in Health Care continue to sweep through the country and I believe in the end there will only be government and mega corps using the not for profit model.

Cost of providing care continues to escalate... things like the 31% increase in utility rates over the last 30 months for one plus even increasing supply and drug costs.

Labor continues to drop... wage freeze still in effect plus full time benefited positions are not filled when vacant.

All of the above with dropping reimbursements is a recipe for small community providers to close up shop.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing...

The meeting today was to announce compressing the Surgery Schedule from 5 to 4 days a week to save on labor costs... it affects all medical and business office employees... managers will keep the doors open to fill the gap.

We continue to lose excellent nurses and techs to the not for profit Kaiser... it's almost like we are a training arm for them.

 

[Bird]

Sometimes you wonder how they come up with some of their rules or policies. When I started on the police department we got 2 weeks vacation, I think it was after 5 years it went to 3 weeks, and after 10 years to 4 weeks, 20 years to 5 weeks (don't remember for absolutely sure at what seniority the increases came but know it was 2, 3, 4, and 5 weeks), and we were not allowed to carry over any vacation time from one year to the next. But in 1971, on rather short notice, I learned that I was going to the Northwestern University Traffic Institute for the 1971-72 school year. I'd had my vacation scheduled for the latter part of October, so I got permission from the City Manager to carry over the '71 vacation and have 6 weeks in '72 (spent the month of July '72 driving to Alaska and back). The city rules were changed for everyone later so employees could accumulate 2 years of vacation before losing any.

For sick leave, everyone, regardless of rank or seniority, earned one day (8 hours) a month and could accumulate up to 1200 hours. However, there used to be (maybe still is) a poorly worded state law that said police officers were to be paid for up to 30 days of sick leave each year. I actually knew one officer who made sure he used 30 days each year and never accumulated any sick leave. I don't know whether that idiotic law was ever changed or not. Of course, once an employee had the 1200 hours of sick leave accumulated, he/she could have called in sick once a month, and still stayed at the maximum accumulation.

The next big mistake I think was made was that if a person retired with 20 or more years service, he/she was paid in a lump sum for all the accumulated vacation, AND whatever sick leave was accumulated UP TO 640 hours. Naturally, I had the maximum accumulation of both when I retired, so I got a check for what amounted to 6 months salary. But the idiotic thing was that I could have called in sick enough times to use up the other 560 hours of sick leave and STILL have the maximum payout on retiring. I could understand not paying for sick leave when you retire, or paying for a PERCENTAGE upon retirement, but to pay for 640 hours whether that was all you had accumulated or whether you had 1200 hours seemed to encourage employees to be dishonest. Fortunately, most, but not all, of us were more honest than to do anything like that.