As mentioned above, taking LWOP for non FLMA or healt related reasons will likely result in a negative note on your records and could reduce your chances of promotion or be a a factor in your termination. While your medical issue was unexpected, unless it was extended (i.e. 10+ days) it shows poor planning/management of leave on your part. I’ve seen people with Use it or Lose It at the end of the year leave be denied use of their leave because they put off their time off until end of the year when everyone else is also using it.
Next year inform your manager in writing as soon as you’ve made vacation plans of your intention to take that time off. This shows you’re conscientious about your company’s needs, given your manager time to make plans to fill in your workflow, and a forward thinker.
Don’t try to justify your request with “But someone else can fill in for me and you’re saving money.” Though they may not express it to you directly, no manager likes to be told how to manage their crew. You’d be coming across as “I know better than you. My job can be done by someone else.” Well, if that’s the case, then we don’t need you, do we?
As for saving money, not paying you will lessen the payroll, but at what cost? Lowered production, OT and/or extra burden on those left behind?
Edit: I used to supervise a four person crew and when one of the crew HAD to ask his daughter to the dentist the next day, despite my asking about other options he may have (having his wife take her, taking a couple of hours off, etc) I had to deny his vacation request because someone was already out. He took the day off as sick, but I noted our conversation in our records.
I’ve worked at places with honor-system sick time, defined amounts of use-or-lose sick time, and places with roll-over sick time. And I’ve worked at one place with a single bucket of “PTO”.
By FAR the worst was the PTO place; maybe that’s because I was never terribly ill. For most of my tenure there, I got somewhere between about 13 and 15 days of PTO.
What this meant in practical terms is that planning any sort of outage from work was perilous, because you know, you might get sick beforehand, or afterward and be without the days to actually take time off with, or basically not get paid.
At the other places, there was more leeway- if I planned a 1 week vacation in July and a 1 week one at Christmas, and managed to get sick for a total of six days during the year, I was still ok, because we got that much sick time that had nothing to do with vacation time. But at my last employer, I’d have been screwed early in my tenure- I’d have had to choose between unpaid time off or coming into the office sick, both of which are cruddy options.
The ONLY situation I could come up with where it’s superior to lump it into one bucket is the situation where you don’t ever get sick- in that case, you get a handful of extra days off that you might not have had otherwise.
And FWIW, at my last employer, you basically had to be out of PTO, and have been out of work some nominal period before you got short-term disability, at something like 60% of salary.
I guess I like the idea of not having to choose; part of my hatred for it was my cheapskate previous employer; it wasn’t uncommon for people to come in sick because they had vacations planned, or had gone on vacation and been sick earlier in the year and had no PTO left. Had they been more generous with the days, it wouldn’t have been an issue I suspect.
Edit: I used to supervise a four person crew and when one of the crew HAD to [take] his daughter to the dentist the next day, despite my asking about other options he may have (having his wife take her, taking a couple of hours off, etc) I had to deny his vacation request because someone was already out. He took the day off as sick, but I noted our conversation in our records.
I’d rather have 10 days PTO than 5 days vacation + 5 days sick leave as it rewards those who don’t call out sick. I’ve worked for a lot of companies and two weeks leave is generous, with three weeks coming after three years. Remember, with the exception of a few states and cities, vacation and sick leave are not mandated, but a perk offered by the employer. See how far you’ll get in an interview if you ask “How many days leave do I get?”.
Small companies will have a harder time covering for a missing employee. There are fewer employees to take up the slack. They offer PTO as a benefit to attract employees, but the effect on productivity could be significant when an employee is absent.
I don’t think you should take LWOP in this scenario. A week is a long time to be gone. It’s likely to create resentment with your boss and your coworkers. I’m sure many coworkers would also like to take LWOP, but the company likely would run into issues if all the employees took a few extra days here and there.
What you might want to do instead is ask to take Friday and Monday off for a 4-day weekend. Work extra hard during the week on whatever deliverables you have so that your absence on Friday and Monday isn’t felt very much. Or maybe tie it into an existing holiday weekend like Labor Day and take an extra day or two around that. That’s a compromise which still allows you to take a long vacation but doesn’t put undue burden on the company.
You could also ask about building up comp time. That could be something like you work late or some weekend days unpaid and those days go into your comp time bank to be used later. Some companies do that during crunch time when salaried employees are working crazy hours. Instead of paying them for those hours, they let them take that time off like vacation after crunch time is over. Comp time would be a way for you to build up something like vacation time so it wouldn’t be like you were just asking for extra days off.
My ignorance fought. I’ve never worked someplace w/ combined leave as PTO. As someone who rarely uses sick leave, I guess it wouldn’t bother me, but still would suck to have to choose between the 2.
I accumulate sick and annual leave each paycheck. Annual has a max carryover of 6 weeks. Sick accumulates indefinitely, but we have no long or short-term disability, so there is incentive not to piss it away. When you retire, at least a portion of any unused sick leave is credited to you in calculating your length of employment. I don’t even know how many thousands of hours I have built up after 32 years…
When I started, I used to schedule dr appts for evenings and weekends, until one time our timekeeper told me that if you aren’t using at least 1 sick day per month, you don’t even make it onto anyone’s radar. Combined with a few other things showing how much my employer valued and respected me ;), I started scheduling my infrequent appts for the middle of the day.
Comp time is generally illegal for private sector jobs as Federal wage laws require non-exempt employees (with a few exceptions like farm workers) be paid OT for any worked hours beyond 40. From an employer’s standpoint, giving comp time is risky not only from a legal standpoint, but from a liability standpoint if something should happen to the worker while on comp time. For example: The worker is involved in a major car accident while he’s on comp time. The employer’s books shows he should have been at his desk at that hour. What is the employer going to say? “Oh, he wasn’t at his desk? Ummm…he must have taken off without my knowledge?”
That said, when I worked for the City, I used to get comp time because I used to run errands before and after work for the Mayor’s office. Since some of this was political, no one officially tracked my hours, I was allowed to keep track of them myself. I was tracking my hours as straight time, until one day someone asked me I was calculating it at 1 1/2 as I should. Bamm…I suddenly had 50% more comp time!
I'm not going to say it was because you weren't terribly ill - but you also seem to be assuming that if you had separate buckets there would be more total leave. And that's not a safe assumption - if they give you 15 days in a single bucket of PTO , they are not likely to give you more than 15 days in separate buckets.
For the sake of example, lets say you get 10 days vacation and 5 days sick *OR* 15 days PTO
You plan a week's vacation in July and another week in December. That accounts for 10 days ( either 10 days out of the single bucket or your entire vacation bucket). That leaves you 5 days. You're out sick somewhere along the way for 10 days. Single bucket or not, you're either cancelling the December vacation ( if your illness comes before it ) or on unpaid leave for 5 days - it doesn't matter whether there is one bucket or not, if you have a total of 15 days paid leave, they aren't paying you to be out for a total of 20 days. The only thing the separate buckets might do is keep you from planning three weeks of vacation - but it also would keep me from planning three weeks vacation even though I am rarely sick and could afford to go unpaid for a couple of weeks if I did get sick. Hence the reason I have 1200 hours of sick leave that I will never use. The PTO method was *possibly* worse for you because of your specific circumstances.
This isn’t true. For every company I’ve worked for, hourly employees got overtime, salaried employees got comp time. The comp time hours weren’t a casual accounting kind of thing - oh, I worked 15 minutes over, I’ll leave 15 minutes early. It was logged and calculated by HR.
Staying off the radar in regards to sick leave/sick time off is a good thing, especially if you’re a new employee or seeking a promotion. While officially a worker’s sick time off can’t be a reason for termination or lack of promotion, it’s definitely a factor in final determination. Who would your rather keep/promote? Someone who hasn’t taken any sick leave or someone who’s out 10 days a year?
It is absolutely legal to give exempt* employees comp time in every state of the US. It is legal to give non-exempt employees “comp time” within the same workweek ( for example,works 2 hours extra Monday and 2 hours less on Tuesday) in most of the US ( California is one exception - there, time and a half starts after 8 hours in one day)
I have no idea why you think this :
Either the books will show the actual time the employees was there- (he worked 8-6 on Monday, but 10-4 on Tuesday) or the comp time will be recorded as x hours earned on this date, and Y hours used on that date - which still shows accurate times of work. Or there will be no record of times at all - my time sheet just has boxes to tick for present or absent and a drop down for type of leave used. Doesn’t list my hours for each day - I just certify that I worked at least 37.5 in each week.
Salaried or hourly doesn’t matter- it’s exempt or non-exempt. And jobs are misclassified all the time
Are the salaried employees Exempt, i.e. getting a set salary regardless if they work over 40 hours? I highly suspect they are and the comp time is a non-required benefit.
As I stated above, giving comp time to a non-exempt employee (hourly or salaried) is illegal in most private sector companies by Federal law.
Another option is to work Sat-Sun to make up for a couple of days you take off. So if your work week is Mon-Sun, Take off S-S-M-T, and then work W-T-F-S-S. Then there’s no comp time issues to worry about. You’re still working 5 days in the week, they’re just different days. Of course, that depends on the kind of work you do if that would be possible to work S-S.
Working 10 hours one day and 6 hours the next in the same week is not comp time. Unless it’s specified in the company policies, it doesn’t matter how the 40 hours that week is achieved. Comp time is when the hours worked is carried beyond the work week. It’s usually dismissed with a “Oh…I got the times wrong”, but could end in termination of the contract.
Edit: I talked about this in another thread, but I used to get a laugh (to stave off anger) when I used to do timesheets and the construction workers would claim they were on site and the Project Manager or Inspector couldn’t find them on-site when they stated (on their timesheets) they were there.
In my case when I worked for the City, I was a non-exempt employee and my receiving comp time was a *wink wink, nudge nudge" deal.
As for certifying an employee was working at the time of the accident, I didn’t specify (and I should have), that if an investigation was conducted (watching too much Law and Order :D) and determination of why the employee was on the road when he should have been at work must be done. Say the employee was seriously injured and disabled because of the accident and makes a claim that it happened on company time. The disability claim shouldn’t be on the company’s policy (since he officially wasn’t working), but it may fall upon it if they can’t prove the employee wasn’t on duty at the time.
As for timesheets, they vary. My current timesheets require me to enter start, lunch in and out and end time. I’ve seen timesheets (usually laborers) that also require break in and out times also.
I am an executive at a small company. We do not like to give employees LWOP, but we will do it in exceptional cases for employees with a good track record.
We don’t like it because we still have to cover their insurance payments while they are not working–we can’t just put their benefits on temporary hold. So it is not all upside to us.
In my experience prior to my last job, most places usually gave 15 days - 10 of vacation(2 weeks) and about 5 of sick time. My last job wasn’t 15 days though- that was the kicker. It was 12 or 13, I think of PTO at first.
That’s why I was calling them cheapskates; they basically combined the buckets at some point AND decreased the total.
It was the uncertainty that made it so maddening; the not knowing if taking a couple of days off because you didn’t feel good would somehow screw you out of vacation time later, or if you’d already taken your vacation time, having to come in when you felt like crap.
You couldn’t plan with it all in one bucket- you always had to reserve a few days just in case.
There are different definitions. I’ve seen more than one where it’s considered comp time even when used in the same payweek - for example, here’s a policy specifying that
Are you saying that the same company dropped to 12 or 13 days of PTO when they previously gave you 10 vacation and 5 sick? If so, that’s the problem , not that they put it all in one bucket. If it was different , well, different employers give different amounts of time off and nothing prevented cheapskate employer from giving you 10 vacation and 2 or 3 sick in separate buckets. I don’t think that would have been any better for you.
But the point I’m trying to make is that the *same thing *happens with separate buckets. Unless your employer allows a lot of rollover , you never know if you’ll be able to take those two weeks of vacation because you might get sick and use up your time. Again, let’s say you have 10 vacation days and 5 sick days. You plan a week-long vacation in July and another in November and you still have your five sick days just in case. But you get sick in March and are out for three weeks - my guess is you aren’t taking those vacations, at least not paid. Or you take those vacations and after you return , you get sick in December. Either you come back after 5 days or you don’t get paid for the sick time over 5 days.
There’s absolutely no guarantee you will get more time off with separate buckets- the only thing that’s almost guaranteed is you won’t be officially allowed the sick time for vacation. It’s just that they are dividing it into X vacation , Y sick rather than you being able to decide on your own how much you want to reserve for possible sick time.