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Love this. I've increasingly seen and heard employers trying to take advantage of the current situation and we need more regulation and protection for workers.

Love this. I've increasingly seen and heard employers trying to take advantage of the current situation and we need more regulation and protection for workers. People are being asked to do extra and too afraid to speak out especially with so many companies making redundancies. One area of focus for me is sickness and working from home. Sick days should be about rest and recovering both physically and mentally. Often see people working through while they aren't fully capable mentally but are too afraid to say so. We need measures like this ASAP.

MereInterest 6y ago
Along the same lines on sick days, I think it should be forbidden for employers to merge vacation days and sick days into "PTO". Merging the pools gives an incentive for people to come to work while ill. For example, suppose somebody has 3 PTO days remaining for the year, and they are all earmarked for Christmas vacation with family. If that person catches the flu in early December, their options are (a) cancel Christmas plans with family or (b) go to the office anyways. The two pools must be kept separate as a public health measure. To do anything else gives a massive incentive to be a vector for illness.
- ljm 6y ago
  I presume that is the US, in which case the US has a hell of a lot of catching up to do in terms of workers rights, and work ethic in general. Not to say we are perfect in the EU (and the UK, how I wish I didn't have to specify that separately now :(), but it's leaps and bounds ahead.
- matsemann 6y ago
  Even better: Sick days shouldn't be a pool at all. In Norway there's X amount of sick days one can use without any hassle (all paid), to use any more all you have to do is show a doctors note. If you have to use more than Y amount of days (chronic illness, a more serious thing or something), the government will temporarily take on the responsibility of paying the worker's wages. I don't think people should be punished for being sick.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    Absolutely agreed, and that sounds like a reasonable solution all around. Having a pool of sick days leads to the same situation, just with different circumstances. (e.g. Somebody who has a planned surgery for long-term health issues needing to save up sick days to use for the recovery.)
    - brtkdotse 6y ago
      > Somebody who has a planned surgery for long-term health issues needing to save up sick days to use for the recovery I don't want to be "that guy" but Jeez Louise does this sound like total dystopia when viewed from the outside. What would happen if you didn't have sick days saved?
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Nearly all lower income employees in the US don’t have sick days, or any paid time if they don’t come to work. If they aren’t working, they aren’t getting paid. Additionally, they are not qualified for unemployment benefits if they are fired due to it being the employee’s fault they could not work.
        brtkdotse 6y ago
        furiously updating proof_of_worst_timeline.xlsx
  - mikem170 6y ago
    Do people pretend to be sick to use up their X days? Many people want to have as many days off as they can. If so, you could be in the same situation, call in saying your sick to use all your days then really get sick at the end of the year. If the answer is no, perhaps that is due to cultural differences. It's my impression that folks in Norway are more responsible in many regards compared to Americans.
    - pavlov 6y ago
- maxerickson 6y ago
  On the other side of it, it's nice to get the time off even if you don't get sick. Companies will tend to argue that sick time is only for when you are sick.
  - gattilorenz 6y ago
    > Companies will tend to argue that sick time is only for when you are sick. To me this somehow... makese sense? Of course a burnout counts as sick time, but for just getting "time off" there's vacation days, which are (in Europe) mandatory. Mandatory as in "your contract grants you at least X days off" and often "you need to take at least X-Y days off in one year"
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Context is king. We are talking about banning lumped PTO. Pretty much every company moving from lumped PTO to vacation+sick is going to make vacation smaller than the lumped PTO.
      - thaeli 6y ago
        Most companies are going to use any change in leave policies to decrease total leave, if they're allowed to do so. This happened when pooled PTO became common as well - moving from, say, 10 days vacation and 10 days sick leave to 15 days PTO.
        pc86 6y ago
        Not disputing that there are shitty companies out there, but I worked somewhere that did this exact thing (10+10 to 15) but it was explicitly said that sick days don't burn PTO. If you're sick you don't work, paid, and if it's more than 2 days in a row you need a note. Basically, treating the employees like adults. If more companies did that people would be happier and more productive across the board.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- donatj 6y ago
  I disagree with your assessment in the strongest terms as I have personally experienced them being separate as achieving the opposite most of my 15 year career. Places I had worked including my current employer, vacation days need to be scheduled at least a week+ in advance. As a person who gets sick a lot I almost always end up having to take unpaid days off when I’m sick because I blew though my 3-5 sick days. Places with PTO I can take my entire pool off as sick time. Never took an unpaid day at a PTO business. Right now. I have 400+ hours of banked vacation time, but I have used all of my sick days for the year. If I get sick I have to take it unpaid or work. It doesn’t make any sense. Honestly I think they should outlaw having them separate.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    It sounds like the problem is in having such a small pool of sick days, not in the concept of separation. By no fault of your own, by getting sick more often, you are forced to give up income (current situation) or to give up your vacation (merged PTO). Neither of those is an acceptable situation, and the solution is to have more reasonable sick leave policies.
    - donatj 6y ago
      PTO is the more reasonable policy. I have weeks of sick days, it’s great.
      - MereInterest 6y ago
        Even better solution: As much sick leave as you need while sick, without taking away your vacation time as a result.
      - Blahah 6y ago
        It isn't a reasonable policy at all. If you are sick for weeks you have no vacation time. That's bad for everyone involved.
        donatj 6y ago
- leetcrew 6y ago
  at a reasonable company, the person in your example would be allowed to accrue negative PTO to go on vacation with their family. there are pros and cons to merged time off. psychologically, it sucks to burn "vacation" to take time off to recover from an illness. on the flip side, there is no reason for my manager to suspect me of abusing sick leave or verify my illness (which sounds super draconian). if I'm not feeling well, it's just a quick slack message and then I go back to drinking tea with lemon. also, unused PTO is usually paid out when you leave the company in the private sector. sick leave, AFAIK, is usually not. there's definitely something to your public health argument, but as an individual it's hard to see why I would ever prefer x PTO + y sick leave over (x + y) PTO.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    In this particular trade-off, yes, you could go into negative PTO for a particular vacation. However, it is still trading a future vacation day away. I don't think there should be any verification for minor illnesses. My company has an unlimited sick leave policy, and I've never needed to do more than send a quick "I'm not feeling well, should be back tomorrow." email. One of the other commenters mentioned Norway's system of having a doctor's note only after X sick days have been used, which seems reasonable. Agreed that (x+y) PTO is individually preferable to (x vacation) + (y sick leave). That said, as thaeli mentioned, usually it isn't a summation. In moving from a standard of (10 vacation) + (10 sick leave) to a merged pool, the result was a standard of (15 PTO) rather than 20. That there isn't an individual push for the separation is also why it needs to be a regulation, rather than something left to the free market, because there is definitely a public health argument on it.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      > I don't think there should be any verification for minor illnesses. My company has an unlimited sick leave policy, and I've never needed to do more than send a quick "I'm not feeling well, should be back tomorrow." email. One of the other commenters mentioned Norway's system of having a doctor's note only after X sick days have been used, which seems reasonable. I'm sure there are reasonable companies that make pretty much any legal arrangement work well for the employees. but I'm an anxious person, so I can't help imagining the worst possible interpretation of my actions. I feel much more comfortable taking PTO than sick leave, even though I have a trusting manager. I understand that different people have different needs/desires regarding time off, but I personally don't take it very often. I'm glad that I can choose employment where this results in me walking away with a fairly large check at the end. I would be very much opposed to any regulation that takes this away, though I could certainly support a law that requires employers to offer a choice between merged and separate.
- brnt 6y ago
  A pool of sickdays? What the? Is there a pool of cancer days too?
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    I share your shock, and try to keep myself from feeling that the current situation in the US is either normal or ethical. To answer your question, yes, recovery from cancer would could from the pool of sick days in most places in the US. If the recovery takes more than the pool of sick days (7-9 days per year, somehow and perversely being different on average by seniority[0]), then all remaining recovery time is unpaid. [0] https://www.surepayroll.com/resources/blog/how-many-sick-days-should-you-give https://www.surepayroll.com/resources/blog/how-many-sick-day...
    - brnt 6y ago
      I'm... stunned. I knew you guys had it bad with (typically) less than half the holidays that we get here, but this is a whole other level.
      - pc86 6y ago
        Unfortunately it's just not accurate. See my sibling comment.
        brnt 6y ago
        Thanks!
    - pc86 6y ago
      Sick days are meant to be used for recovery from minor illness, not for cancer. This is why short- and long-term disability insurance exist, which pay your full salary or close to it. For example my employer pays for everyone to have ST and LT coverage up to 60 or 80% of salary (I forget which honestly) and you can purchase additional coverage which is (I think) pretax to bring that up to 100% for one or both. For example I have the partial coverage for ST but pay something like $15/mo for 100% on the LT if something were to happen to me requiring extended care. And every job I've ever had from six-figure consultant to $6.15/hr dishwasher has offered STD/LTD insurance (of varying quality, of course). It's not nearly as barbaric as you're making it sound if you actually understand how it's supposed to used.
- mchusma 6y ago
  I think in practice they are merged to avoid incentives to lie. Every org I have worked at that had separate pools there was widespread lying about being sick. Nobody really asked or cared, so in effect they are the same thing. In practice lying was incentivized, and managers that didn't want to be lied to just adopted the policy that your sick days were yours to take for any reason. I don't think this is something that should be legislated. It's really far down on the list to address.
  - pc86 6y ago
    This is why I think a better system is 1) employees get n hours of PTO; 2) sick days don't use PTO; 3) sick days are not explicitly tracked or counted. If you're not completing enough work because you're abusing pseudo-unlimited-PTO-via-sick-days, or you magically get a cold every Friday before a week off, that gets handled by your manager directly. But it doesn't make sense to penalize the 99% of employees who are responsible and honest.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      > If you're not completing enough work because you're abusing pseudo-unlimited-PTO-via-sick-days, or you magically get a cold every Friday before a week off, that gets handled by your manager directly. But it doesn't make sense to penalize the 99% of employees who are responsible and honest. this just sounds like a shitty situation all around. it really sucks to suspect someone / be suspected of something that can't be conclusively proven one way or the other. if you can be fired for being sick too often at convenient times, you don't really have unlimited sick leave in practice.
      - pc86 6y ago
        I think I just didn't explain it well enough. A common refrain against unlimited/untracked sick time is that employees will abuse it to be lazy, and the only way to fix that is to either closely monitor/track sick days used, or have a pool. My point was that if performance is an issue there are ways to address that. And if enough work is getting completed, it doesn't matter how many sick days were taken (so no need to track/have a pool).
- ghaff 6y ago
  In practice, people can usually go into "debt." But the shared pool still encourages people to work sick rather than use what's effectively a vacation day.
- chrisdhal 6y ago
  My company doesn't have separate sick days, but you are given 5 days (40 hours) of "personal days" that are independent of your PTO. This seems like a decent compromise in the sense that I can use them as PTO without doing the "pretend to be sick" thing. These do not roll over or accumulate, so they are always the first days of "PTO" used, but they are independent of any tenure or other PTO.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  The thing is that sickdays (like healthcare) just sholdn't be a concern of the employer at all. When I'm sick, an insurance pays me. My employer doesn't. This insurance happens to be public/tax-funded, which is nice. I don't expect my employer to pay me when I'm not working because I'm sick. Why would they? That would create bizarre incentives to push people to work when they are ill. My employer pays me during my 5-6w paid time off, that's it. That's vacation. Whether was sick for 0 or 50 days that year doesn't matter.
- ck425 6y ago
  Huh, in which country is that a thing? I'm guessing US?
cft 6y ago
This is all good for now, until the day when Chinese goods become so expensive priced in Euro/USD that Europeans will have hard time being able to afford them. And that day is coming.
Loughla 6y ago
>I've increasingly seen and heard employers trying to take advantage of the current situation Our leadership, once they finally relented to any amount of remote work, were saying, "your time at home is considered 'on call' time". I addressed a formal request for a pay differential, based on labor laws and the use of the words 'on call'. I stressed that I was more than willing to be on call, but I would need my pay to reflect that, legally. Now, when I shut my PC down at 5 and shut my phone off at 5, they no longer get mad that they can't get me after hours.

MereInterest 6y ago

Along the same lines on sick days, I think it should be forbidden for employers to merge vacation days and sick days into "PTO". Merging the pools gives an incentive for people to come to work while ill. For example, suppose somebody has 3 PTO days remaining for the year, and they are all earmarked for Christmas vacation with family. If that person catches the flu in early December, their options are (a) cancel Christmas plans with family or (b) go to the office anyways. The two pools must be kept separate as a public health measure. To do anything else gives a massive incentive to be a vector for illness.

ljm 6y ago
I presume that is the US, in which case the US has a hell of a lot of catching up to do in terms of workers rights, and work ethic in general. Not to say we are perfect in the EU (and the UK, how I wish I didn't have to specify that separately now :(), but it's leaps and bounds ahead.
matsemann 6y ago
Even better: Sick days shouldn't be a pool at all. In Norway there's X amount of sick days one can use without any hassle (all paid), to use any more all you have to do is show a doctors note. If you have to use more than Y amount of days (chronic illness, a more serious thing or something), the government will temporarily take on the responsibility of paying the worker's wages. I don't think people should be punished for being sick.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Absolutely agreed, and that sounds like a reasonable solution all around. Having a pool of sick days leads to the same situation, just with different circumstances. (e.g. Somebody who has a planned surgery for long-term health issues needing to save up sick days to use for the recovery.)
  - brtkdotse 6y ago
    > Somebody who has a planned surgery for long-term health issues needing to save up sick days to use for the recovery I don't want to be "that guy" but Jeez Louise does this sound like total dystopia when viewed from the outside. What would happen if you didn't have sick days saved?
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Nearly all lower income employees in the US don’t have sick days, or any paid time if they don’t come to work. If they aren’t working, they aren’t getting paid. Additionally, they are not qualified for unemployment benefits if they are fired due to it being the employee’s fault they could not work.
      - brtkdotse 6y ago
        furiously updating proof_of_worst_timeline.xlsx
- mikem170 6y ago
  Do people pretend to be sick to use up their X days? Many people want to have as many days off as they can. If so, you could be in the same situation, call in saying your sick to use all your days then really get sick at the end of the year. If the answer is no, perhaps that is due to cultural differences. It's my impression that folks in Norway are more responsible in many regards compared to Americans.
  - pavlov 6y ago
maxerickson 6y ago
On the other side of it, it's nice to get the time off even if you don't get sick. Companies will tend to argue that sick time is only for when you are sick.
- gattilorenz 6y ago
  > Companies will tend to argue that sick time is only for when you are sick. To me this somehow... makese sense? Of course a burnout counts as sick time, but for just getting "time off" there's vacation days, which are (in Europe) mandatory. Mandatory as in "your contract grants you at least X days off" and often "you need to take at least X-Y days off in one year"
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Context is king. We are talking about banning lumped PTO. Pretty much every company moving from lumped PTO to vacation+sick is going to make vacation smaller than the lumped PTO.
    - thaeli 6y ago
      Most companies are going to use any change in leave policies to decrease total leave, if they're allowed to do so. This happened when pooled PTO became common as well - moving from, say, 10 days vacation and 10 days sick leave to 15 days PTO.
      - pc86 6y ago
        Not disputing that there are shitty companies out there, but I worked somewhere that did this exact thing (10+10 to 15) but it was explicitly said that sick days don't burn PTO. If you're sick you don't work, paid, and if it's more than 2 days in a row you need a note. Basically, treating the employees like adults. If more companies did that people would be happier and more productive across the board.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
donatj 6y ago
I disagree with your assessment in the strongest terms as I have personally experienced them being separate as achieving the opposite most of my 15 year career. Places I had worked including my current employer, vacation days need to be scheduled at least a week+ in advance. As a person who gets sick a lot I almost always end up having to take unpaid days off when I’m sick because I blew though my 3-5 sick days. Places with PTO I can take my entire pool off as sick time. Never took an unpaid day at a PTO business. Right now. I have 400+ hours of banked vacation time, but I have used all of my sick days for the year. If I get sick I have to take it unpaid or work. It doesn’t make any sense. Honestly I think they should outlaw having them separate.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  It sounds like the problem is in having such a small pool of sick days, not in the concept of separation. By no fault of your own, by getting sick more often, you are forced to give up income (current situation) or to give up your vacation (merged PTO). Neither of those is an acceptable situation, and the solution is to have more reasonable sick leave policies.
  - donatj 6y ago
    PTO is the more reasonable policy. I have weeks of sick days, it’s great.
    - MereInterest 6y ago
      Even better solution: As much sick leave as you need while sick, without taking away your vacation time as a result.
    - Blahah 6y ago
      It isn't a reasonable policy at all. If you are sick for weeks you have no vacation time. That's bad for everyone involved.
      - donatj 6y ago
leetcrew 6y ago
at a reasonable company, the person in your example would be allowed to accrue negative PTO to go on vacation with their family. there are pros and cons to merged time off. psychologically, it sucks to burn "vacation" to take time off to recover from an illness. on the flip side, there is no reason for my manager to suspect me of abusing sick leave or verify my illness (which sounds super draconian). if I'm not feeling well, it's just a quick slack message and then I go back to drinking tea with lemon. also, unused PTO is usually paid out when you leave the company in the private sector. sick leave, AFAIK, is usually not. there's definitely something to your public health argument, but as an individual it's hard to see why I would ever prefer x PTO + y sick leave over (x + y) PTO.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  In this particular trade-off, yes, you could go into negative PTO for a particular vacation. However, it is still trading a future vacation day away. I don't think there should be any verification for minor illnesses. My company has an unlimited sick leave policy, and I've never needed to do more than send a quick "I'm not feeling well, should be back tomorrow." email. One of the other commenters mentioned Norway's system of having a doctor's note only after X sick days have been used, which seems reasonable. Agreed that (x+y) PTO is individually preferable to (x vacation) + (y sick leave). That said, as thaeli mentioned, usually it isn't a summation. In moving from a standard of (10 vacation) + (10 sick leave) to a merged pool, the result was a standard of (15 PTO) rather than 20. That there isn't an individual push for the separation is also why it needs to be a regulation, rather than something left to the free market, because there is definitely a public health argument on it.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    > I don't think there should be any verification for minor illnesses. My company has an unlimited sick leave policy, and I've never needed to do more than send a quick "I'm not feeling well, should be back tomorrow." email. One of the other commenters mentioned Norway's system of having a doctor's note only after X sick days have been used, which seems reasonable. I'm sure there are reasonable companies that make pretty much any legal arrangement work well for the employees. but I'm an anxious person, so I can't help imagining the worst possible interpretation of my actions. I feel much more comfortable taking PTO than sick leave, even though I have a trusting manager. I understand that different people have different needs/desires regarding time off, but I personally don't take it very often. I'm glad that I can choose employment where this results in me walking away with a fairly large check at the end. I would be very much opposed to any regulation that takes this away, though I could certainly support a law that requires employers to offer a choice between merged and separate.
brnt 6y ago
A pool of sickdays? What the? Is there a pool of cancer days too?
- MereInterest 6y ago
  I share your shock, and try to keep myself from feeling that the current situation in the US is either normal or ethical. To answer your question, yes, recovery from cancer would could from the pool of sick days in most places in the US. If the recovery takes more than the pool of sick days (7-9 days per year, somehow and perversely being different on average by seniority[0]), then all remaining recovery time is unpaid. [0] https://www.surepayroll.com/resources/blog/how-many-sick-days-should-you-give https://www.surepayroll.com/resources/blog/how-many-sick-day...
  - brnt 6y ago
    I'm... stunned. I knew you guys had it bad with (typically) less than half the holidays that we get here, but this is a whole other level.
    - pc86 6y ago
      Unfortunately it's just not accurate. See my sibling comment.
      - brnt 6y ago
        Thanks!
  - pc86 6y ago
    Sick days are meant to be used for recovery from minor illness, not for cancer. This is why short- and long-term disability insurance exist, which pay your full salary or close to it. For example my employer pays for everyone to have ST and LT coverage up to 60 or 80% of salary (I forget which honestly) and you can purchase additional coverage which is (I think) pretax to bring that up to 100% for one or both. For example I have the partial coverage for ST but pay something like $15/mo for 100% on the LT if something were to happen to me requiring extended care. And every job I've ever had from six-figure consultant to $6.15/hr dishwasher has offered STD/LTD insurance (of varying quality, of course). It's not nearly as barbaric as you're making it sound if you actually understand how it's supposed to used.
mchusma 6y ago
I think in practice they are merged to avoid incentives to lie. Every org I have worked at that had separate pools there was widespread lying about being sick. Nobody really asked or cared, so in effect they are the same thing. In practice lying was incentivized, and managers that didn't want to be lied to just adopted the policy that your sick days were yours to take for any reason. I don't think this is something that should be legislated. It's really far down on the list to address.
- pc86 6y ago
  This is why I think a better system is 1) employees get n hours of PTO; 2) sick days don't use PTO; 3) sick days are not explicitly tracked or counted. If you're not completing enough work because you're abusing pseudo-unlimited-PTO-via-sick-days, or you magically get a cold every Friday before a week off, that gets handled by your manager directly. But it doesn't make sense to penalize the 99% of employees who are responsible and honest.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    > If you're not completing enough work because you're abusing pseudo-unlimited-PTO-via-sick-days, or you magically get a cold every Friday before a week off, that gets handled by your manager directly. But it doesn't make sense to penalize the 99% of employees who are responsible and honest. this just sounds like a shitty situation all around. it really sucks to suspect someone / be suspected of something that can't be conclusively proven one way or the other. if you can be fired for being sick too often at convenient times, you don't really have unlimited sick leave in practice.
    - pc86 6y ago
      I think I just didn't explain it well enough. A common refrain against unlimited/untracked sick time is that employees will abuse it to be lazy, and the only way to fix that is to either closely monitor/track sick days used, or have a pool. My point was that if performance is an issue there are ways to address that. And if enough work is getting completed, it doesn't matter how many sick days were taken (so no need to track/have a pool).
ghaff 6y ago
In practice, people can usually go into "debt." But the shared pool still encourages people to work sick rather than use what's effectively a vacation day.
chrisdhal 6y ago
My company doesn't have separate sick days, but you are given 5 days (40 hours) of "personal days" that are independent of your PTO. This seems like a decent compromise in the sense that I can use them as PTO without doing the "pretend to be sick" thing. These do not roll over or accumulate, so they are always the first days of "PTO" used, but they are independent of any tenure or other PTO.
alkonaut 6y ago
The thing is that sickdays (like healthcare) just sholdn't be a concern of the employer at all. When I'm sick, an insurance pays me. My employer doesn't. This insurance happens to be public/tax-funded, which is nice. I don't expect my employer to pay me when I'm not working because I'm sick. Why would they? That would create bizarre incentives to push people to work when they are ill. My employer pays me during my 5-6w paid time off, that's it. That's vacation. Whether was sick for 0 or 50 days that year doesn't matter.
ck425 6y ago
Huh, in which country is that a thing? I'm guessing US?

cft 6y ago

This is all good for now, until the day when Chinese goods become so expensive priced in Euro/USD that Europeans will have hard time being able to afford them. And that day is coming.

Loughla 6y ago

>I've increasingly seen and heard employers trying to take advantage of the current situation Our leadership, once they finally relented to any amount of remote work, were saying, "your time at home is considered 'on call' time". I addressed a formal request for a pay differential, based on labor laws and the use of the words 'on call'. I stressed that I was more than willing to be on call, but I would need my pay to reflect that, legally. Now, when I shut my PC down at 5 and shut my phone off at 5, they no longer get mad that they can't get me after hours.