Yes, it should.
I’ve worked for companies with differing policies. At one place I worked, we did not even have sick time, you just had one large bucket of PTO. Which for me worked out well because I rarely get sick. And I used it all every year for vacation most of the time.
In CA if you have any PTO left over, the company has to pay you out if you leave or get laid off. But they do not have to pay you for unused sick time.
I was recently laid off by a company based in another state. I had PTO leftover and was paid out because I live in CA. The people who were in the same layoff pool as me that lived in that state got nothing per the labor laws there. Which to me is complete bullshit.
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It’s pretty ridiculous that employers don’t have any built-in cushion of staff for when people go out sick. The fact that people feel indispensable is a feature. One of the reasons I hated taking sick days was because of the hassle I knew it would create for my co-workers. Well, that, and the inevitable backlog of email.
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Capitalism is the state religion of the US. The Invisible Hand rewards those who sacrifice in it’s name. If not now, then surely in the next life.
Here’s hoping more people lose their faith. 
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At my last job I was told while being trained that ‘of course you should take sick days if you are sick, but FYI nobody has done it in over 20 years’. Message clear.
At my current, good job if I was foolish enough to show up with a cold or fever they would ask me wtf I was thinking, get out of here before you get everyone else sick. On top of our paid sick days we also get quite a few days of ‘special time off’ for things like ‘my kid is sick’.
My point is unions are awesome, if we make use of them.
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No, that’s not /s in an American context. I worked for a company that had a Japanese connection and a lot of those ideals where put in place at this American company. That included unlimited PTO / sick. That lasted less than 2 years because they routinely had +20% of the employees not coming to work. I can sympathize with people who need time off, but as someone who has worked a great deal on a production line I just can’t with some people. And that some people is a much larger percentage of the general population in the US than a lot of posters here seem to think.
“Prepandemic, Fleetcor workers in their 20s and 30s took one or two sick days a year, she says. Now, it’s more like three to five.”
I wonder what changed between now and before the pandemic. I can’t think of anything.
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Unlimited PTO is a scam for its own reasons, though. It’s a hugely anti-worker concept although it sounds great in theory.
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So you’re saying every single day, 20% of the workforce wasn’t there? I don’t believe that. And if it is true, then I suspect that there was some other factor influencing that. Either people didn’t feel like they were getting paid what the work was worth, or they were being mistreated in some other way. I do not believe what you are telling us.
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American workers who have lived through a global pandemic, stagnant wages, and 10% inflation are needing mental health days? No sh*t.
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Not to mention child care during a time period when daycares and schools were not an option.
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Yup. I could be off for 6 months on full pay, as could every one of my colleagues in one of the biggest employers in the world. We’re not though.
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This is one of the scams of “unlimited” PTO. Unlike “real” PTO, which counts as income and you’re entitled to (and gets paid out to you when you leave the company) you’re not entitled to anything when it’s “unlimited”. It becomes discretionary and you can be denied time off. Of course nobody is just taking six months paid leave. They would get fired.
Research has shown that at places with these “unlimited” plans, workers on average end up taking less time off.
My employer recently switched to this type of thing this year to much fanfare and it’s awful. I don’t take a lot of vacations, so in the past I could reasonably say “I’ve accrued enough vacation time this year that I’m going to take every Friday off for the rest of the year and you can’t do shit about it because I’m entitled to it”. Now I have to ask permission every time.
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Oh, this is the NHS. If you’re legit that ill, you’d get 6 months full pay, 6 months half pay, then an enhanced pension if you were still too sick to work.
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Got it. I was thinking along the lines of vacation, not sick time which for many US employers is a separate bucket for accounting and tax purposes.
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Yeah I should also add something else. I don’t know if this is common or not, but at both of the engineering jobs I had, there were really two standards. One for hourly and non-exempt workers, and one for salaried exempt workers (exempt meaning exempt from overtime rules, for those not from the US). If you were salaried exempt, which I was, you could honestly take off for doctor’s appointments or when you were sick, and as long as you let your boss know, no one cared. No one kept track of how many days you were out sick, unless it got to be a lot, and there was no paperwork to fill out, nothing. At my last engineering job, which was at a manufacturer, after I’d been there about two years, I had to have major surgery on my leg. I was going to be out about two months. That put me into short term disability territory, so I filled out all the necessary paperwork and turned it into HR, and then went and had my surgery. Now, because I had only been there 2 years, I was supposed to only receive 50% of my pay while I was out. My next paycheck had the full amount, as did the one after that. I called HR, somewhat reluctantly, and was told to not worry about it. As it turns out, I was well liked there, and the President of the company told the HR manager to toss the short term disability paperwork and just keep paying me as if I were working. Again, I don’t know how common this sort of thing is, but these policies typically impact hourly workers a lot more than anyone else. But I also may have just worked at some unusual companies, I don’t know.
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Related:
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I remember my shock when I first learned that those who work for the top companies in South Korea (and hope to advance up the ranks) NEVER take sick days. They do stay home when they are sick. They take out vacation days instead.
Sure, you’re allowed to take sick days (oh, no no no don’t ever say out loud that we don’t), but it MAY unofficially count against you when they line up all the numbers to “objectively” evaluate you for promotion. Every bit might make the difference between you finding yourself gently being put out to pasture or having your project approved.
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