CNN had an article about abandoned vacation days amounting to more than $34 billion in lost benefits. These are expenses employers are banking on incurring anyway, so why not make it an intentional thing? If you’re facing a “use it or lose it” situation, why not “donate” that day’s salary to the federal budget/debt? No skin off your nose, right?
Sure, there’s no mechanism in place to do it, but shouldn’t you be able to if it were an option?
How would this work?
The unused leave is in terms of extra productivity not money.
Suppose I have a $52,000 salary and 2 weeks paid vacation, that I don’t take. Can I demand that the company work over $2,000 to the government even though they only have $52,000 budgeted for me? If they can do this I might prefer them just to pay me $54,000.
It would be more like $50K salary and 2 weeks, which represents a reserve of $2k until you take it. (I assume we are all ignoring taxes on this.) If you work for a full year, take no vacation, and then leave, the company owes you $2k for vacation. The old AT&T vested vacation for a year Jan 1 - when I left Jan. 15 as part of the trivestiture I got 5 weeks of pay on top of all my parting gift money, which was pretty sweet.
But I doubt companies will go along with this plan, since vacation is good for morale and to test that no person is so indispensable that things fall apart when they leave. I’ve read that those dealing with money are forced to take vacation to keep possible scams from being hidden forever. Anyhow, this much money is a drop in the bucket.
The company should have $54,000 budgeted for you, $52,000 for your salary including the vacation pay you get when you take off, and another $2,000 to pay a replacement for you when you’re on vacation (or to hire enough employees to cover for each other when some take vacations). If you don’t take vacation, they save the $2,000, so in theory they could give that to the government. In reality, if they assume a lot of employees won’t take their vacations, say 50%, they might only budget $53,000 per employee. If this allows them to make an excess profit of $1,000 per employee, they could by rights donate this to the government, but in reality their balance sheet may only allow them to budget the $53,000.
I don’t know about most of you, but in my office we don’t get any temps to cover for people when they’re on vacation. Either the work gets reassigned to another full time employee or it waits until you get back. Our office budget would be the same regardless if everyone uses all of their vacation time or none of it.
This makes a ton of assumptions about how companies pay employees.
It might work like this for employees working an hourly wage.
It definitely doesn’t work like this for salaried employees. It’s not like these companies will hire temporary workers to fill in. Mostly, that work gets covered by the other people at the office or sits there and waits for your return. There’s no ‘excess profit’ to give away.
Obviously, instead of working at your job that day, you’d go work for the Federal gov’t for the same amount of time and thus donate your productivity. So you could spend a day being a park ranger, or run a code compliance inspection on a nuclear power plant or captain a Destroyer or audit someones taxes.
So the gov’t would have to pay for one less day from someone trained to do those jobs, plus all the people that will be killed as a result of having workers with no experience in charge of parts of our military and domestic infrastructure will improve the longterm outlook for Social Security and Medicare.
No skin off the employee’s nose, but now U.S. businesses are down $34.3 billion because everyone donated their unused PTO to the government. How do you suppose businesses will make up the shortfall?
ETA: Businesses aren’t banking on incurring the expense of unused PTO. They know when they hire people that some of them will let their vacation time build up until the point that it expires unused.
My old job allowed you to donate excess vacation time to other employees who were out for medical reasons and had run out of sick leave.
Not really. Large employers generally know that approximately x% of the allotted leave will go unused, and take that into their planning.
There are plenty of high-pressure, high-salary, high-ambition workplaces where it’s understood that people will be working 60-80 hour weeks and using only a fraction of their nominally allotted leave (e.g. Wall Street, big law, big accounting and consulting). The budgeters know that well in advance.
There are no doubt small employers who occasionally get a few hundred bucks windfall because Chester didn’t go on vacation, but trying to somehow capture that money is a pointless exercise (even aside from the question as to why the government has any right to try).
The company I work at (1000+ employees) donates unused vacation time above a certain amount to charity, so there is certainly real dollar value associated with vacation time, at least where I work.