Over the years various co-workers have fallen victim to difficult circumstances - usually major illness - in which they are in need of extended (paid) time off work. The call inevitably goes out for donations of sick time from those who have it and are feeling altruistic. A very honorable gesture, we can all agree.
So, currently, there are two co-workers in such need, and the Bat Signal has gone out. There is no real pressure, and for the most part nobody really knows who does and who does not donate. The rally cry comes from the heart.
Here’s where I try to not sound like a dick.
I do not call in sick. Why? Because I like to be prepared in the event of a catastrophe. If I break my pelvis or come down with some horrible disease, I am in pretty good shape with regard to sick time. I plan it this way.
Others, by choice, are not so frugal. They take ‘mental health days’ at the drop of the hat. Their attitude - and I’ve heard this voiced - is “they give me sick time and I’m going to use it”.
As you have by now guessed, some who have squandered their sick time have been some of those on the receiving end of significant donations from those who have some to give.
I’ve donated in the past, but I think I’m done. We all make choices. We live with our choices. I’ll take part in the fundraisers (yes, there are two planned), I’ll donate items to be auctioned off, and I will do any needed work that goes along with the events. But I will no longer surrender time off that I have earned (and may in fact need myself one day).
I am curious as to other Dopers’ opinions on this.
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I think you are in good shape. Especially since you will be participating in other forms of help.
Back when I had a job that had benefits, with paid sick leave, I never used it if I could help it. Then, when my kidneys declared war on me, and I had to be hospitalized, I had plenty of time, and no need to take unpaid leave.
I pretty much agree with you. I earned it, I might need it, it’s there in the bank for such a contingency. I have never had any sympathy with mental health days, usually that just means people are in the wrong job. They should take more active steps to fix their situation, not just wallow in extra days off.
I am surprised, though, to find that there are companies that will allow this. I have over six months of accumulated sick time which my company will never have to shell out for. Even if I weren’t retiring soon, weighing the slim odds of me getting hit by a bus or contracting a serious debilitating illness against the certainty of this other needy person actually using the sick time I donate, seems like a big expense for the company.
Also, I’m wondering if your state does not have disability insurance? Here (California) if I had to be out for over, I think it’s 30 days, disability kicks in and is used to stretch out my sick pay for longer, if necessary, and that also reduces the expenses of the company paying for my time off.
Having said all that, if I were retiring sooner and someone needed it and the company allowed it, I would donate whatever time off I have left.
As far as I know, companies generally treat accumulated sick time very differently from accumulated vacation.
Sick time is an allowance from the company for paid time off, but accumulated unused time does not belong to the employee. There is generally no limit to how much you can accumulate (at places I’ve worked), and when you leave the company for any reason, you do not get paid your unused sick time. Also, because the company owns that time, they can make rules about how you use it – the obvious rule being, that you’re really only supposed to use it for medical leave purposes.
So the time really isn’t the employee’s to donate. If an employee wishes to donate his sick time to another employee, that’s the employer’s time he’s giving away. So I would imagine it’s up to the employer to decide if that’s allowed.
The is all in contrast to vacation time, which belongs to the employee as soon as it’s accured. The employee has greater freedom in choosing how to use that time, and when he leaves the company, he gets paid for any remaining time. As far as the employer is concerned, it’s time already given to the employee. So I would expect that an employee can donate his vacation time to another employee. If the boss wishes to veto that, I wonder how that will play out.
This is my reasoning. I’ve been in my current job for seven years and have taken two sick days in that time (following a car accident). Others ring in regularly and for the most trivial reasons, in my view. I like the fact that I have a stash of sick leave should I need it for surgery or because of an accident and I plan to hang onto it.
At my last job, it was allowed, but I was never asked. We accumulated equal amounts vacation time and sick leave, but only the first half of each year’s sick leave days could accumulate, and you were capped on how many vacation days you could accumulate by the end of the fiscal year (under 50). I can see how someone who had cancer or something similar would easily run through their sick leave and vacation time.
I don’t recall if it’s allowed where I work. Here, we accumulate PTO days that have to cover everything, including paid holidays like Christmas - in a hospital, people work all kinds of odd schedules and someone’s got to staff it around the clock, so it’s just easier to set it up that way. The amount you can accumulate is also capped; I used to bump up against that frequently until I started taking about 2 weeks’ worth of vacation yearly in addition to odd other days off. I also have short- and long-term leave policies for serious problems, which pay out a percentage of your salary while you’re away.
Whether I’d donate depends on the situation, I guess. I’ve already offered to donate days off to a friend outside of work, if he needs (and he hasn’t yet); he’s battled cancer on and off, and his wife just changed jobs recently so she’s short on leave. I told him if he needed someone to be a driver for him for procedures that require someone to drive the patient home, I’d do it.
We are not allowed to roll over any sick or vacation time from year to year, so this doesn’t come up. OTOH we have both short- and long-term disability insurance, and medical coverage with a relatively low annual out-of-pocket max, so the worst of the hit would be avoided for most people anyway.
(Besides, with a whopping 4 days of sick leave a year, half of it gets used for routine medical and dental appointments, which doesn’t leave much if, you know, you actually get sick. But that’s a rant for another day.)
Back in the day (early 90’s), I was called in to my boss’s office. She demanded why I took one ‘mental health day’ off per month.
My explanation;
I get 21 days per year of combined PTO. You guys get upset when I take a whole week off because I have no backup. So one of the ways I take it, and keep myself sane, is to pick one day a month when I have no meetings and no deadlines, call in and then go do something fun, or just zone out at home.
Now, if you like, I’ll stop doing that. And I’ll start making plans to take a 2 week vacation next year. (You’ll probably want to start working on getting me someone as backup.)
Which would you prefer?
Boss immediately decided that my monthly MHD’s were awesome and never bothered me about it again.
I’ve been asked to donate PTO three times over the years. Didn’t know the first person, hated the second person (a-hole manager(not mine)), didn’t feel like pandering to the third person who burned through her 33 PTO days by September screwing off and calling in for bullshit reasons before a real reason bit her in the ass.
We don’t have any kind of sick-time-donation scheme where I work, which I appreciate. If a company allows workers to donate their time to someone who needs an extended time off, why don’t they just allow the person to take the time off and let everyone else keep their sick time for when they get sick? Why set up a system that tends to create office drama and guilt instead of just recognizing that your employees aren’t robots and occasionally have extraordinary needs?
How does it work if the donor and donee are at vastly different pay rates? E.g. if a front-desk receptionist donates a week of vacation time to the VP of Sales, does the VP get a full week of vacation time at full pay or does it count as a full week of receptionist-level pay? Is it pro-rated to a different number of days, e.g. 1 week of receptionist pay equals 2 days of VP pay?
We have what’s known as a “sick leave bank” at work. If you choose to sign up for it, you donate a certain amount of your leave to the bank, and you can apply for benefits from the bank if you use up your own sick leave. I don’t participate because, as people have stated above, I don’t call in unless I’m really too sick to work. As a result, I have a huge amount of leave time built up in the event that I suffer a serious injury or illness.
Just once since I have been here. A coworker’s son had a year long losing battle with cancer. They were very liberal with giving him time and I’m sure he was able to get some off the book time but we all chipped in so he could stay with his child as much as possible.
I should clarify that sick time and vacation time are lumped together and accumulated with each paycheck.
Besides calling in sick regularly, others basically use the time up as they acquire it (I’m up to 16 hours, time to take a couple days off). I’m more of a saver for reasons already stated.
My position is this: I’m very sorry about your circumstances, but while you were taking days off I was showing up at work every day.
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There’s no provision for transferring time off at my work. Paid time off and sick time are completely separate things.
Our sick days are called “unexcused absences”–we get paid for up to 6 days per 12 month period, and they count against our attendance record. After 7 days any medically related absence gets handled as a disability. There is also FMLA time available. I don’t know how management would deal with an absence longer than 6 months.
I’ve donated leave before, like you, I never heard who else did or did not. Our sick leave and vacation time are lumped together; since that’s the case, a ‘mental health day’ is really just someone taking the day off. I don’t see why that should bother me.
It’s easier for me to take a day here and there when it looks like I’m going to have a relatively light work week, rather than plan out weeks ahead of time when I take a day off and it means that I’m in a better position to judge if I can get away for the day.
My firm does not have such a policy, we’re a law firm with less than 50 employees.
We get five sick days a year. They don’t carry over from year to year, so there is no incentive to “save” them for a potential catastrophe. So, when I’m sick I stay home. Or when my disabled husband has doctor’s appointments, I take the time off. Thanks to one bad cold (mine) and a dozen doctor’s appointments (his) I’ve used up all my sick time and most of my vacation time for the year already. If I get sick again before December 31, I’ll stay home, I just won’t get paid for it. I’m not dragging my carcass into the office, spreading my germs and not getting anything done, I’m too old for that nonsense.
At my last job a group of us decided to chip in vacation days for a coworker whose dad was dying out of state. She was an important part of the team and everyone liked her, but her position was structured so she didn’t get paid time off so she wouldn’t have been able to go be with him at all without some help. In the end we managed to scratch together about three weeks of time at her pay rate and I’m glad we made the effort. No one asked us to do it, but as a group we all had a lot more banked time than we were probably going to use that year so it made sense to pass it on and do the good deed.
How does sick leave and holiday work in Australia? Do you get separate amounts of both, like the Americans?
In Spain we don’t get an amount of “sick days” as a benefit, so the question is about something which can’t come up; if you’re sick you’re sick; doesn’t mean you can go on sick leave forever and still get paid in full, but it works very differently from the US. Vacation is non-transferrable; unpaid or reduced-pay home leave is granted on a person-by-person basis and therefore non-transferable.