The term for this is a “mental health day” and I wouldn’t care, as long as the person doing so didn’t do it too often or when something critical is going on. Not that I’d be tempted to pry too much into a team member’s reasons for needing a day off.
It can certainly be abused. My husband told me of a co-worker who was too sick to come to work… frequently. Then one day when she’d called in sick, she posted on Facebook that she’d had a really enjoyable run outdoors that day. And she was friended with her team lead. Dumb, dumb, dumb. IIRC, she was not with the firm much longer after that (as she had long since exhausted her pool of leave time).
Some companies pool sick leave and vacation into one bucket so you don’t have to feel guilty about doing so, though I find that argument a bit suspect - my husband had to burn a week of his “vacation” time when he needed surgery, before short-term disability (paid at full salary) kicked in. I’m in the increasingly-rare pool of people for whom sick leave does NOT require burning vacation time.
It doesn’t really happen to me that I really don’t want to work without being sick. I’m rarely sick, anyhow.
However, I will take the occasional Friday or Monday off with short notice–a friend is in town, or some interesting trip came up. A day or two notice is totally fine here.
And I will take half-days pretty frequently without any notice at all. Maybe I have to take my cat to the vet, or visit a store that closes early. No big deal, especially if I answer emails by the end of the day.
In principle, I can take mental health days, but it’s never come up. The closest was my vaccine response, but I’d put that in the actually-sick category.
Technically we have unlimited time off. In practice, I don’t know anyone that abuses that. I suspect that people that did would probably not be fired but would find promotions and raises harder to come by.
It’s not so much that it’s different from normal paid vacation time , it’s typically (although apparently not always ) a matter of not having separate buckets. For example, my timesheet lists various sort of time off - annual leave (vacation), sick leave, holiday leave, personal leave and so on. The rules regarding each type of leave are different regarding use/accrual/expiration. PTO typically means that there is only one bucket rather than having X weeks vacation time and Y weeks sick leave and Z personal days. It’s better than separate buckets for some people and worse for others.
PTO can stand for Paid or Personal Time Off. Some employers do away with separating vacation time from sick time and put it under a single umbrella of Personal Time Off.
Paid Time Off would be used as a general indication that employees are offered an allowance of time off where they get paid, some jobs don’t offer any paid time off at all.
Ok, I sort of see how that works. Would that include things like compassionate leave too?
I get the impression - rightly or wrongly - that sick days are part of someone’s benefits package, and people will take them whether sick or not. Have I got that wrong? Appreciating that it will vary from place to place. Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve never regarded sick leave as a benefit, and honestly couldn’t tell you what my ‘allowance’ is before they stop paying me!
No government mandates for paid leave on the federal level for sure. I’m not sure if any states have implemented such a thing. Standard practice for corporate/office type jobs is 2 weeks + additional weeks as years in service increase.
The mixing of sick days and vacation days is a problem, workers treat sick days like vacation days, rather than keeping them strictly for when they are physically ill. In response, employers erase the distinction, then anytime you are thinking of staying home sick, you have to burn a ‘vacation’ day to do so.
I may be a bit old fogey about it, but most folks get 2 ‘mental health’ days every single week, and more mental health days we call vacation days. I’m not a fan of using sick days as additional vacation because it blunts the proper purpose of sick days, giving people the freedom to stay home when they are actually sick, without there being a backend loss on their part.
By “compassionate leave” , I assume you mean what I know as bereavement leave . That differs by employer - my current employer doesn’t provide any additional leave for bereavement, but does allow you to use up to 15 days of sick leave per year for bereavement. A former employer gave three days additional leave - but only for certain relationships so that I couldn’t use “bereavement leave” if my cousin died.
As far as sick leave being part of someone’s benefits package , and people taking them whether they are sick or not that’s going to very much vary place to place. Most employers who separate the time have some sort of rule (enforced or not ) about sick leave being for medical reasons and but people actually use them is going to depend greatly on how much is granted, does it roll over , is it paid out when you leave the job or are there other benefits to leaving with accrued sick leave on the books. I would expect that someone who gets five sick days a year with no rollover would probably use every day - while someone with a policy like my employer’s* might try to avoid using sick leave even when they are sick ( not that I mean they go to work sick - I mean they use some other sort of leave).
Ok, so, probably silly question, but there’s no government mandated paid annual leave?
Federal law doesn’t mandate any paid leave. Some states and cities mandate paid sick leave and/or paid family leave but I don’t know of any that require paid vacation.
* I can accumulate up to 200 days of sick leave. Whatever I have left when I retire is converted to a credit toward my share of my health insurance premium in retirement and gives me additional service time to be used in calculating my pension
Doreen explained it well. Paid Time Off is just that - can be used for anything.
Depending on the employer, it may be treated quite differently in terms of “rollover” i.e. if you have x days a year of PTO, and don’t use it all, what happens at the end of the year.
My employer offers x weeks of vacation time per year, and x days of sick leave per year. Neither rolls over - as of January 1, you lose anything you did not use the previous year (I can petition to be allowed to roll SOME of the vacation time over if circumstances are unusual, like the year I was on a project where I truly could not use it all up due to deadlines). And if I have a longer illness - like the year I needed wrist surgery - that goes directly against short term disability - which, for me, means up to 6 months at full salary before long-term disability kicks in.
My previous employer also had separate sick vs vacation policies, but their vacation policy was a bit better in that you could accrue up to x weeks, a few hours a week. If you burned all your vacation time, you’d have more added over the next few weeks. No “use or lose by December 31”.
My husband’s is similar (though as noted, the occasional sick day comes out of that pool of 5 weeks a year).
A Federal employee earns x days of vacation a year (starting with 10 days, I think, but it increases as you stay there longer). They can carry over something like 2 x their annual amount - e.g. they can bank up to 4 weeks, as a newer employee. They can also bank their sick leave indefinitely, which is nice as the Federal government does not have short-term disability per se. When I was working on a system that dealt with such (25+ years ago), unused sick leave could be used to effectively extend your service when calculating your retirement - e.g. if you’d worked for 25 years and had 6 months unused sick leave, your pension was calculated as if you’d worked 25.5 years. That was because a lot of people near retirement age tended to be :cough cough: “sick” a lot during their final months.
I don’t accrue sick leave and would need to dig out my staff handbook to see what the company ‘allows’ before they stop paying me - I think if you’re sick for longer than a week, then you go onto ‘statutory sick pay’ which is a government mandated amount. But sick leave is certainly not counted as a benefit you can store up.
Government mandated annual leave is 28 days (including 8 bank holidays). I get about 40 days, including bank holidays. And my birthday off. I can roll 3 days over each year or sell them back to the company. Compassionate leave is, as you say, for bereavement for close family, and is only about 3 days.
I’d say it also varies with the messaging. One place I worked counted sick “occurrences”, rather than days. So if you had the flu for 2 weeks, that was one occurence. And if you didn’t come in one Monday because you had a hangover, that was also one occurrence. And if you had more than a couple of occurrences a year, HR took an interest, but if it turned out that you were taking every-other Monday off to recover from chemo, they would re-classify all those technically-different-occurrences into one big occurrence. (that exact situation happened to a guy who worked for me.) They didn’t roll over, but I don’t think anyone tried to take the max. (Well, no doubt someone did, but it certainly wasn’t the norm.)
Federal law requires employers to grant some minimal sick leave and family leave, but there’s no federal mandate that it be paid leave. Many states require some minimal amount of sick leave. (I work an extremely part-time job, and I think I’ve accrued half an hour of paid sick leave over a couple of year. Which is stupid, but they have to book it due to the law.)
It depends on the job. At my current employer, I get Vacation and PTO as separate buckets. All my sick time is supposed to come out of PTO, but I can use it for whatever I want (within reason). Technically, vacation time is for extended breaks (week long or greater) and PTO is supposed to be for a day or two, but in my 12 years here that has never been enforced by any boss.
We used to be able to carry over some vacation (but not PTO) into the new year, but no longer. So it’s a use it or lose it situation, meaning nothing gets done in December.
Just to clarify, perhaps I answered a different question that the OP is actually asking.
On it’s face, I took the question to mean “do you think you have the right to take the day off at the last minute just because you feel like it”. And to that, my answer remains “hell no”.
I absolutely feel I have the right to use my allotted days off any way I want, but unless I’m sick or an emergency arises, I wouldn’t simply call in at the last minute just because I didn’t feel like working that day.
As for going in to the office sick, I’m very rarely sick. If I’m running a fever or not in complete control of my, ahem, bodily liquids then I stay home. I only mentioned it to illustrate that I personally am not a big “caller inner”.
I work for small county government. They are generous in their vacation days and sick days. Some people have thousands of hours of sick time saved up. And the reason is, we don’t abuse it.
A few years ago some employees, and the powers that be suggested going to all PTO. All in one bucket. They would start from scratch. Wipe the board clean and give everyone the same to start all over again.
That did not go over well with people that have copious amounts of sick leave saved up.
I can use mine to take care of my 92 year old mother. I use about 2 a month. I have to.
We don’t get paid for sick leave when we quit/leave/retire.
IMHO, it’s the supervisors job to raise a flag when someone starts taking a sick day every week.
Yep, I’m in cobalt blue California and there is zero requirement to provide vacation time, paid or unpaid. Sick leave is mandated at the rate of 1 hour for every 30 hours worked and can be limited down to a cap of three days a year and six days banked total.
In practice all decent employers offer some amount of paid vacation and usually more sick leave than the minimum. For skilled workers the market demands it and once you establish paid vacation certain regulatory rules do kick in as they are considered part of the wage package. My own benefits are quite generous by American standards and I am unionized and thus legally protected by a collective bargaining agreement.
But skilled workers and halfway decent employers are one thing, sweat shops are quite another. A shitty employer at the lowest common denominator can get away with a lot of what I consider predatory and abusive working conditions quite legally. It’s a travesty really.
You can also get what’s called intermittent FMLA. That’s what I had for my migraines. I got migraines so bad that not only could I not possibly work, I was unsafe to drive the 40 miles to work. And I obviously couldn’t schedule my migraines, but I got maybe 6 or 7 a year that made it impossible for me to go into work.
I had a pretty generous company, but it was especially generous for me because I started with the company near the end of the calendar year. If I started in the current year, I’d start with 15 sick days a year (that would start to and continue to increment based on years of service). If waited to start into the next year, that would go down to 5 days a year (with the same incremental scheme). The woman in HR who was at the company I was hiring into told me to work one day in the current calendar year, then, they’d give me two weeks off without pay in order to work my “two weeks notice” at my old company. I worked there for 34 years and ended up with thousands of hours of sick time when I retired. I was paid out but only at 25%. I was also paid off for unused vacation hours, but even though the total vacation hours was much less than my sick hours, I got a much bigger check for my vacation hours!
then I stay home. I only mentioned it to illustrate that I personally am not a big “caller inner”.