Oh no. I’m going to work that day.
You only get 10 vacation days a year? Holy crap. I get 14 and even that’s on the low end of the spectrum. No offense, but I’d hate to work for your company.
Do you live in the United States? 10 day is typical for new hires in the US. it usually bumps up after X# of years with the company.
Seriously, is cockroach a big change from dung beetle? Who’s going to notice?
My firm changed their policy a couple of years ago so that now, we get all time off under one bucket. HR basically acknowledged that good employees were basically being forced to lie and call in sick when they really just needed a day off for whatever reason, and that was stupid.
So, yeah, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to break company policy, but having a policy that divides sick time and vacation time is just dumb.
Well 10 discretionary days plus the mandatory holidays, of which there are 9. So 19 vacation days total (and of course the 5 sick days).
Okay, I really don’t want to come across as being on some kind of moral high horse here, and I also wonder whether this is a US thing, but I do actually think it is wrong to used paid sick leave when you aren’t sick. I’ve always looked at paid sick-leave as not penalizing you for being ill as it is outside your control and you’d do the work if you could. By the same token, I think being healthy should’t have to be rewarded. In fact, if you say that being healthy should be rewarded, are you not implying that the sick are being ill on purpose? Not saying I have never pulled a sickie myself, but always with a guilty conscience.
At my company, if you take an unscheduled day off right before or right after a holiday, you don’t get paid for the holiday.
I work in one of the top 200 largest public companies in the US (90,000 employees) and 10 days is standard for corporate employees for their first five years. Non-corporate employees get even less at first. On the other hand, when I left my old company, I had 23 vacation/personal days and more holidays than I do here. It’s highly dependent on the industry. (I moved from a Big Four accounting firm to a huge retail organization).
I’ve never in my life heard of any employer suing an employee because the employee took a sick day when they weren’t really sick. I can’t even imagine them winning that suit - and not because “everybody does it”, but because it’s not the company’s place to decide if someone qualifies is “really sick”. Employers are not entitled to demand the details of their employees medical records. They have no right to sit in judgement of what qualifies as “sick.”
It’s not an “excuse” to say that employee/employer agreements go both ways. If the employee is promised X days a year, it’s not unreasonable to expect the company to provide X days a year. Expecting the employee to voluntarily refrain from taking that part of their compensation package is wrong … but sadly, about par for course in current US management-worker relations.
Holy shit, I can’t believe the number of self-righteous, morally superior replies in this thread (actually, I guess I can). Oh noes! You’re lying to your shitty corporation, which would never lie to you and always thinks of your feelings above all else! What an unethical louse you must be! Fuck that. I’ve rarely taken a sick day when I was actually sick, nor have most of my co-workers, from the conversations I’ve had. If the company has a problem with it, it can change the sick day policy. I feel no guilt about this at all. Especially since I know everybody lies every single day of their lives.
I think stress management falls into the category of health. If you’re worn out, overwhelmed and stressed and simply need a day off to decompress, thereby avoiding future issues you are not in anyway violating the definition of “sick”.
Good companies do not call sick days “sick days”, they call them “personal days”. If you need to make a doctor’s checkup where you are not sick, so be it. If you need a mental health day, so be it. Many jobs discourage workers from using their vacation time one day at a time thereby taking every other Friday off or some such, as a result you might have little opportunity to get a one day reprieve from the stress. I’ve never worked at a company where they even asked what my “sickness” was, that seems to be none of their business and might even be a HIPPA violation.
As with most things in life, don’t abuse the system and get your job done and everything magically goes smoothly. I suspect that companies are far and few between who will rake a excellent employee over the coals for a non-sick sick day. If you’re a crappy employee, well that might be a different case. If you are taking a sick day in the middle of the companies busiest week or missing deadline because of them then I suspect questions will be raised, and still I doubt many HR managers would allow a manager to terminate for that reason alone for fear of some legal action.
Menal health days are generally accepted in our work place by management and the concern is more if too many rack up as a sign of worker burnout or whatever.
But one worker took a sick day then worked somewhere else that day and got caught. Dismissed immediately.
Most people seemed to agree with that, so with a mental health day allowance, theres an unspoken contract that its not really a holiday as such.
Otara
I don’t know about TriPolar, but I don’t handle those situations as sick days (which don’t roll over year to year). I use a vacation day (which DO accumulate year to year). Because my particular condition renders me essentially useless for several days, I suppose technically I could ethically use the sick days. However I have chosen not to medicate and arguably am bringing it on myself–it’s questionable in the same way as using sick days for a hangover.
But to the OP: IMHO it’s not ok to use sick days as vacation just because they’re there. I view it as an abuse of mercy. If the company were resigned to everyone taking their 5 days, or whatever, they’d just give you an extra 5 days of vacation and expect you use that when you’re sick. But they don’t have it set up that way because the 5 days is more a measure of how much mercy they’re willing to have.
Dude, you can take all the sick days you want. You obviously need them! 
Since this is IMHO, I take what people say as their opinion. You are obviously welcome to your own. If the OP didn’t want their opinion, they wouldn’t have asked.
And the OP doesn’t seem too upset about the responses, so please don’t feel you need to be upset for them 
I’m not getting “upset” for anybody but myself. I just get annoyed that no matter how innocuous an offense, a lot of people on these boards will take it as an opportunity to get all schoolmarm-ish about it. Why anyone would bother to judge someone for something that hurts nobody is beyond me. As far as everybody lying, I’ve yet to meet the exception.
I have to say, I’m at least as amazed as you, but for the complete opposite reason. It’s not that I feel or even wish to be morally superior (although I’ll understand if you perceive it as such), it’s just that I honestly had no idea the entitlement view of sick leave was so widespread and was held so defiantly.
Guess it depends on how your company treats you, and how loyal you are to them. Personally, I’ve never felt any particular love for any of the companies I’ve worked for.
True enough - and there’s a fair spectrum of corporate attitudes ranging from workhouse to holiday camp, which I’m sure flavours people’s experiences and attitudes.
For the last twenty years or so, I happen to have had a series of positions that were jobs I chose, but wanting to do them has usually been a factor in getting appointed to them too - and they have happened to be for employers who recognised those who made the effort.
I work for local government at the moment, where there still prevail some serious pockets of apathy and terrible work ethic, but it’s a vicious circle for some of these people - they’re not given opportunities to develop because their attitude stinks, and their attitude stinks because they’re stuck in a dead end job. They seem to want it handed them on a plate, which just isn’t going to happen. There’s no reason for it to happen.
This is good for me though, because a person only has to be moderate in competence, conscience and diligence, to be perceived as well above average. In truth, I know I’m neither brilliant nor overly devoted to my work - it’s just that the background is dark enough to make me look bright.
The US works too fucking hard.
“Americans, on average, work 350 hours more each year than Europeans. That’s 9 weeks of labor.”
“…average working hours in the United States rose nearly 12 percent between 1973 and 2000.”
(And back in 1973 you could support an entire family on a single blue-collar income. Try that today)
“In France, for example, national law guarantees workers 11 public holidays, a minimum of five weeks paid vacation, and a 35-hour work week.”
That may be true. I’m in the UK and I currently get 26 days paid leave per year, plus 5 or 6 bank holidays, plus the opportunity to earn some extra days off via flex and lieu hours worked. I don’t know what the deal is for sick leave (I could look it up, I guess). I don’t feel the need to take sick days as if they were leave, although there are those that do.