Not only that, but the fact that an employee takes a long period off work doesn’t mean that the job doesn’t get done.
Remember, the employee is being paid with time/money donated by her fellow workers, not with the money that was originally set aside for her salary. If they need another worker in her position, they can use the money that they would have paid her, and get someone to fill the job temporarily.
Hell, at my job the university actually saves money when a full-time worker takes leave without pay, or leave paid for by other people’s donations. If a faculty member takes a semester of leave without pay at my university, the cost of teaching that person’s classes using adjunct and temporary labor is less than half the amount that the full-time faculty member would have been paid.
A faculty member who teaches 3 courses a semester, and is paid (for example) $70,000 a year can be replaced for a semester by an adjunct who is paid between $4,000 and $5,000 per course.
The news reports haven’t mentioned if Trayvon Martin’s mom is taking FMLA. I seriously doubt she could based on what I know about the rules. FMLA is under the Federal Dept of Labor. FMLA does cover personal crises within a family, but I can’t see anyone getting 8 months off.
Apparently there’s some mechanism that Florida’s panel used.
She could be a psychological mess. That would be a medical issue. In that case it would seem that she has UP to 8 months of leave donated if needed which is a different thing than taking off 8 months in advance.
Nitpicking here. I said intranet, not internet. My coworkers can find my info on the internet as can anyone else who cares to look. Its public info, the taxpayers have the right to know how their money is being spent.
The county intranet doesn’t allow anyone that sort of access. It confused me as well.
Anyhow, I’m happy to see you again. I hope your health is good and that your son is doing well.
Leaps back into the discussion…during the last year, I was off for 4 months. I used 40 hours of PTO and then months of cat time to recover from surgery. Several months later, I burnt up another month of PTO because my sweety needed me to help him recover from heart surgery.
This was PTO and cat leave that I had earned as a government worker. We haven’t had raises for years, but our cost of living keeps going up, our insurance costs more every year. Our PTO is something that we work for, and is ours. I still don’t understand why anyone would be upset that we give it to someone or take a week off to play online games.
Heck, I know someone who uses his PTO to fly to Florida and golf for a couple of weeks. As a non golfer, I think its a waste of his PTO. I certainly don’t think he should give that PTO to someone who was injured in a car accident. Its his, he can use it as he wants.
I don’t think it’s right for anyone to babysit your PTO. It is yours. I’ve used unpaid TO to be a PTA mom. I’ve also used it when I’m sick. Since my contract began as a p/t employee, my PTO is pretty limited, even though I’m f/t now. My colleagues have used PTO to watch football. Whatever. It’s theirs. If it’s approved, it’s approved. And now that my hours have changed, I made it pretty clear that there were a couple of days where I was committed to something, and if I were granted the same benefits as other f/t employees, I’d have that liberty to miss an afternoon. So yeah. PTO can create bad feelings. I’ve seen teachers get mad at other teachers for taking PTO to go drinking/partying/baseball game/etc. even though it’s theirs.
And this thing the OP posted was clearly legal, voted on, and allowed. So being upset at Trayvon Martin’s mom is misguided. Hell, if I were her, I’d capitalize on that! Why not? It’s in the rules. People clearly support her.
To me, it’s 8 months of paid leave that was shocking- shocking for anyone who wasn’t ill or taking care of an ill person. Maybe I’m just not used to the idea. People in other sectors or in other countries probably see that as normal.
I can see where your point of contention comes from. I think government workers are generally more sensitive to public criticism when people start crying about taxpayer money. As a teacher, I’m on the other end of it A LOT. Even though I’m privately paid, our company gets public funds, so I’m still sensitive. And even if I worked in a private school with rich parents, I’d still feel for my public-sector teacher brethren. (Like really. Stop bitching about my winter vacation.)
I don’t agree with the OP that it’s about taxpayer funds. I just thought the tone was kind of inappropriate, because again, Zimmerman hasn’t been tried yet and she’s advocating him as a murderer and etc. So for the government (essentially that) to take a stand and pick her side of the case, it just seems strange. To me. Again. No stake in this here.
Missed the edit window and wanted to add that those in the private sector not employed in organized labor or large corporations, are not accustomed to such programs as small labor pools make them all but unworkable. What seems like a luxury and waste, amounts to a day or two of donated time when you have such a large base to draw from.
The woman in question makes almost $70,000 a year! I don’t think that there’s any white-collar, professional work available in the private sector that pays such an extravagant salary. It’s a wonder she can fight her way through the piles of cash every day in order to get to work.
It’s not relevant in this case. But letting an employee go off for 8 months is certainly not unheard of. A large employer should have a system in place to make sure that operations keep running since anyone can turn up pregnant or become burdened with an ill spouse or child.
And they would be wrong. I personally like having generous leave, but if I had additional mouths to feed and college tuitions to pay for, I’d probably prefer the higher salary I could get in the private sector.
If people who work in the private sector feel resentful about this discrepancy, they should either join a union or move into the public sector.
Add me to the set of people that finds this system distasteful.
Allowing people to donate their leave to others means that PTO becomes proportional to a person’s popularity rather than need.
And practically speaking, having, say, one person take a month off may well be worse for an organisation than having 20 people each take a day off; that one person might be the specialist in something.
Just because people are voluntarily donating their leave doesn’t make it fair in every sense.
At my workplace, I am not aware of any ability to donate leave–although I am low enough in seniority not to have accumulated enough to donate, if such a thing can take place.
But if someone takes FMLA, someone else (or more than one someone else) does that job, and some other people’s daily work is adjusted, and someone new gets a typical new hire job.
So, if someone set up a donation box for someone that allowed people to contribute cash, would you consider that unfair, because it’s just a popularity contest?
Sounds like constructive grieving to me. Anyway, taxpayers are being gipped by this assuming that Mrs. Martin is providing more use to them employed than not. Though I doubt aceplane57 was making that contention.
By giving some people extra leave in the case of bereavement it implies that the legally designated amount of bereavement leave is insufficient.
So, that being the case, this is a rather unfair system to those people who suffer a bereavement and aren’t the popular guy in the office. Once again you’re penalized for being the shy guy in the backroom versus the guy on reception that everyone knows.
Fairer surely would be to make the amount of bereavement leave, for all, be either the same or proportional to need.
Also note that no-one addressed my other point: that the distribution of leave makes a difference to the organisation. 20 people taking a day off spread throughout the month: fine. The “external clients guy” taking a month off in one chunk: problem.
No, it implies no such thing. It implies that there are people who have earned a benefit who want to give that benefit to someone else, just like they can with cash.
Should we also regulate people’s charitable donations the same way, so that a charity with less need doesn’t get more donations just because they have better outreach and public relations?
In a large organization that has enough employees such that a tiny percentage of them can contribute eight months’ leave, this is not going to be a problem.
Having an employee take 8 months off must be a pain. As a military reservist, I’m glad that employers are legally required to tolerate it. They always seem to manage. Seems like there’s been a lot of deployments in the last 10 years.
