As a German I find the concept of “allotted sick days” disturbing.
What if I told you that it usually also takes away from your vacation days?
So if you get sick too often, no vacation for you that year.
That’s sick (pun intended). Over here it’s the other way around: When we get sick during a vacation, we get the vacation days back.
Take your civilised attitude and get out of here!
Although, at least in my field of work, it’s a bit frowned upon to actually get your vacation days back when you get sick.
It really shouldn’t. My company has reprimanded people for not responding their vacation days. The law is very clear on this and courts have stated as well: vacations are meant for recovering your energy. Healing from an illness does not allow you to recover from work, so you must be granted that time again.
Only a refreshed worker is a productive worker.
That’s not the case in the UK, your annual leave is a legal entitlement, and unrelated to any sick time you may have to take.
The workers of your nation need to organise a few general strikes to get their basic rights sorted out, I don’t like seeing workers abused.
Jokes on you, I haven’t been able to afford a vacation in a decade 😂😭
My sick days and PTO are the same. I have a chronic illness I’m working with doctors to treat. Between occasional sick days, and doctors visits, I never get a vacation day
That really sucks. I’ve never had a job where they separated PTO and sick days. They just pool them together.
I’ve been lucky enough to always have a job in the public sector and it’s very common they are completely separate. Likely less pay, but far better retirement system than most private sector jobs.
I’ve worked at companies that do both. There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
The worst of all is so called unlimited PTO.
There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
I get why you consider “getting more money” a pro, but in my book any financial incentive to avoid taking a sick day when you are actually sick and instead try to power through and infect everyone in the office should be considered as con.
Well I’ve worked at a few places where they’ve transitioned between the two methods. They just end up taking your vacation days + sick days and calling it PTO. So you end up with the same number of days off but a bit of flexibility on how to use them. If you have a great year and don’t get sick, that’s 5 to 10 more days you can take off without pretending you are sick. I don’t see a big difference if my 36 days comes out of 1 bucket or two.
Also, a lot of places don’t have caps on sick days so if you don’t use them in a year, you can carry forward into the next year.
Very few places will give unlimited sick days.
So you end up with the same number of days off but a bit of flexibility on how to use them.
That’s the problem - sick days should not have a “flexibility” aspect to them. You take them when you are sick, so that you can heal and so that you can avoid infecting other people.
Since you don’t have a choice about being sick, ideally there shouldn’t be a choice about whether or not you take a sick day - but realistically this can’t be tightly enforced (at least not with reasonable measures), that it ends up relying on good will, and that there will always be incentives to fake sickness in order to take sick days and incentives to ignore sickness and still go to work (and these incentives don’t balance each other out - they incentivize different people differently, widening the gap of unfairness)
But still - even if you accept that real life have such deficiencies - this does not mean one should create policies that make them even more deficient!
Damn, the US needs to get their shit together
How inconsiderate of you, think of the billionaires who would suffer!
What if I told you merging PTO with sick days was to get around the Federal requirement for employers to not use your use of sick days against you. By eliminating sick days and rolling them all into one pool, they now can use being sick as an excuse to fire you.
Haben wir bei uns auch, nur dass es natürlich deutlich mehr Tage sind
Yeah WTF, what if you get sick again? Do you tell the flu to sit it out or prepetuate the epidemic?
Believe it out not, straight to jail.
wait until you see this documentary they made a few years ago, called “Breaking Bad”.
You get everyone else sick, like Supply Side Jesus intended!
I was always told to never call in sick. If you’re sick, you go to work and only if the manager says to go home should you leave work.
Again, WTF?
Shit that doesn’t even save you at some places. I was working and started feeling shitty ended up having a 103° fever, and was sent home. It still counted as an absence against me during my review.
So compare that with my experience of a few years ago when one of my relatives had an accident, and I was the one who could care for them for a few weeks.
Their conversation with their boss:
- Hey boss, I had an accident, I’ll be out of work for a bit.
- Oh, what happened?
- Look, I would rather not talk about it.
- When are you coming back?
- It will most likely be a month.
- Okay, see you in a month then.My conversation:
- Hey HR person, I need two weeks of care leave to care for a relative.
- Okay, see you in two weeks!And that was all that’s legally required of us, and legally permitted to the employers. We were both fully paid for the leave, as both employers were insured for exactly this. And the sky hasn’t fallen, and the GDP is up, and we still live in a prosperous first world country.
Yeah that would not fly. In America, workers are viewed as children and owners are parents. The owners feel like their children are trying to get out of work. It’s the owners job, as the responsible parental figure to steer the child-employee in the right direction. American workers are unable to be responsible on their own. (Mind you these are all adults).
You also see this in American academia with faculty routinely referring to grown adult students as “kids.”
Damn that sounds nice.
Unfortunately you’re likely taking unpaid time off until short term disability kicks in (usually 6 weeks)
Yes
Is this one of those comics where you have to laugh otherwise you’d cry because it’s so true?
I don’t think there’s ever been a bad Mr. Lovenstein strip.
I had a coworker whose kids got sick back to back and then his wife, and then he got ill too. By March, he had no PTO and had to cancel his vacation that summer. He was worn the fuck out come summer. I think he was able to flex to work “four tens” here and there, but it sucks that “sick” and “vacation” are not only the same bucket, but could get you punished.
As a European I can’t grasp this concept. As if sickness is something somebody chooses by will.
I’ve worked at companies where sick days are part of PTO and others where sick days are separate. In the past 2 years, I’ve had 1 with pti covering it all and 2 with separate vacation and sick accruals.
Having “an amount” of sick days is absurd. I may get sick or not. If I have an amount, I may even be compelled to reach it.
Of course we always use all our sick days. Its a game and I’m only commenting on how its typically done.
No, sickness is not a choice, but staying at home to recover IS a choice.
Just came in to work, projectile vomited everywhere then passed out on the floor. Bonus if you could pull off a seizure.
In this situaution, wouldn’t you be worried about incurring medical costs if someone called for help?
Which also is NOT a worry in Europe. In some countries the worst that can happen if you ask for an ambulance that was completely a waste of time is getting fined about 30 euros. Worst outcome I had from visiting A&E was to have to pay for the prescribed antibiotics.
It’s only professional ethics to bring whatever bug you have and share it with colleagues.
Sharing is caring.
Wait I thought sharing is communist—
(promptly gets blasted with a cloud of water droplets carrying some rhinovirus)
Hit your head on the floor and claim worker’s comp.
Where I work, I get 5 days worth of PTO which can be used for either sick time or vacation time. It takes (8) 40 hour weeks to generate 1 new PTO day. We’re not allowed to take unpaid time off, you’re required to use your PTO. If you do not have any PTO left, you go up to 40 hours negative. You are then required to work 40 weeks to break out of the negative. If you decide to quit or are fired while in the negative, that hourly difference is deducted from your last paycheck.
It didn’t used to be this way. The family owned company I work for was bought out by a 500 million dollar corporation.
Shits fucked yo.
There’s no way them deducting pay out of your last paycheck is legal in any way. How hasn’t soneone sued the hell out of them?
This is the American mindset via a comment my previous boss made: “We’ve closed the shop due to heavy snow conditions, it’s not my fault it snowed so you need to use your own vacation time if you want to get paid.”
Same reasoning for illness: “it’s not my fault you got sick so why should I lose anything?” (they see loss of productivity as a punishment they don’t deserve)
(Sorry if you end up with 3 of these, my phone or Lemmy is being dumb trying to send this…)
I’m so glad for the German worker’s rights. I practically can’t be fired for being sick.
In fact you can’t be fired at all (in the sense of "leave immediately and we won’t pay you anymore“) unless you really fuck up (like, assault your superior or something along those lines).
That’s not true. The hurdles are high but you can get fired for sickness.
That’s what “practically” implies. It’s possible, but firing someone in a legal way is really really hard. Most fired employees just take the hint, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal to fire them.
You’re right, I took the meaning of “practically” too literal (as in only theoretically possible).
It’s true, you can just call your doctor in Germany and get your employer notified and they have to accept. You don’t even have to be sick. It’s getting dangeous once you accumulate more than 6 weeks of sick days but even then there are still hurdles for the employer before they can fire you.
It’s getting dangeous once you accumulate more than 6 weeks of sick days
No, it just means the health insurance starts paying your salary, and you’ll get less money. But for your employer it’s actually better, because they don’t have to pay you anymore.
That’s only true for 6 consecutive weeks of sickness.
One of the prerequisites to fire someone for sickness is that they are sick “often” and there’s no improvement to be expected. That’s a soft limit but if you’re sick for 6 accumulated weeks for a number of consecutive years, that box is pretty clearly checked because it’s twice the average of sick days in Germany.
But that doesn’t make sense even in capitalist mindset. Finding another specialist is going to take time and resources. Plus, this is apparently a very good employee, already tested. The new one will likely be not as good if this one is perfect.
I understand that this comic is a hyperbole, but seems like firing people over using their sick leave is financially detrimental.
Yeah, but the new guy’s gonna be cheaper than the one with experience!
I mean, think about the next quarter benefits! Stop searching for stuff like ‘reliability’ or ‘long term’. That doesn’t mean anything to the shareholders who’ll jump ship the next month.
(It’s definitely an hyperbole, but it does raise a good point over hyper short-termism leading to mass layoffs for ‘profitability’. The sick days are just the excuse needed to part the employes that will support their hyper toxic management structures from the ones who aren’t ‘team players’)
Onboarding a new employee is incredibly expensive. I think the stat is that it takes on average 6 months for the company to break even for the hiring costs. That’s what I’ve read through. No idea how true it is
It’s very true!
Six months is the most conservative estimate I’ve heard. There’s some specialties where it’s closer to 24 months.
But the boss’ bonus will have arrived in their account, before then. And with a little luck, the next company wide reorganization will make it someone else’s problem.
It most definitely is, and it is such an idiotic mindset when actual number crunching happens.
Employee A: Been here for a year (due to getting a performance review in the comic), already trained, already knows much about the system and environment, apparently perfect Gets fired for using a sick day
Employee B: newly hired (since we fired the last guy), needs to be trained (as each work environment can be totally different even in the same field), knows next to nothing about the work flow or systems or environment, might be perfect but we won’t know for sure until next year or until they mess something up really bad Loss of money on training someone for a role that used to be filled by a person who was already engrained into the work
= a really fucking dumb way of looking at how you handle management
The new person could also use EVEN MORE sick days or whatever. Just…? Brain… are you there…?
It doesn’t make sense but it happens constantly, especially in low-level environments Where Heads Are a dime a dozen, it’s usually not straight out being terminated however it’s done in the case of yeah you did everything perfectly but we can’t financially afford to give you a higher rating than average. Which does more or less the same thing cuz it tells the employee well it’s time to go elsewhere so they’re going to be doing training costs anyway
companies do this kind of stuff everywhere. for me thats usually the time to work less and pretend i’m working more.
Actually I’ve read studies saying people who took their full PTO tended to get better year over year raises.
I would like to see how they handled companies that have “unlimited” PTO.
unlimited is a scam, people tend to take fewer days when you tell them it is unlimited comparatively as when they have a fixed number of days. I know, I did the same. Now I take care of consuming my allowed PTO entirely and I take a lot more days off than before.
Living that now. Unlimited PTO sounds great, but the reality is that your days off ARE being tallied, and they WILL be used against you for the purposes of denying raises, lowering bonuses, or withholding promotions. It’s up to you to police your own usage of it, because your managers will basically give you all the rope you’d like to hang yourself with.
Is PAID Time Off ever unlimited?
Yeah, it’s a real thing at some companies.
You have to guess how much you can get away with?
Exactly. If a company tells me that I get unlimited time off then tell me when the Christmas party is because I’m on PTO until then.
My current job has unlimited PTO, but it’s not called unlimited. It’s called “discretionary” time off. And I think that’s an OK term for it. You don’t have a limit to your vacation/sick days, but you have to be a professional about it and not let things fall apart at work.
I’m fortunate in that we mostly work as a team and treat each other as human beings, even including the project manager and our direct management. So it can be alright at a good place. For example, we were asked our vacation plans for the quarter and I decided to add an extra day to a decent short break, and I gave myself a week long staycation next month.
But no limit also means no minimum, so of course the shittier places will use it to make things worse.
It becomes a negotiation every time you want to use it. It’s terrible unless you’re good at haggling over your own wellbeing.
This might be confusing cause and effect. People who feel more secure in their jobs are more comfortable taking time off.
cries in working parent
My employer gives us 8 sick days a year. When we run out of those we are supposed to use vacation time. It’s downright depressing how fast we blow through the sick time in a bad winter season.
I’m very very lucky to work from home, so I can neglect my sick kid at home while getting work done and thus avoid having to burn through my vacation time as well. Others aren’t so lucky.
This is pretty much illegal in most European countries btw. But not all countries assure sick children time off.
I finally have a job that has good benefits, after only having contract work and unpaid internships in the past. I have unlimited pto and unlimited sick days.
I am too scared to use them because I don’t want to accidentally use too much.
Yeah it’s funny, a lot of companies are switching to “unlimited PTO” because studies show the average employee ends up using less.
I co-owned and worked at a small business and we tried unlimited PTO.
We had to add a two-week minimum clause because some people weren’t even taking that.
As an employee, I came to prefer a fixed amount that expired because it felt like it should all be used.
With unlimited, it seems some people who felt guilty or loyal or “busy” would take less while others who felt entitled would take more.
Many people use as many as you give them. If you don’t give them a number, they only use what they need.
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