There are usually 2 kinds of paid leave (Paid Time Off) in the US: sick and vacation. Sick leave is an allotment of days where you can call in sick and still get paid. Vacation leave is the same but for vacations.
Until recently, there was an expectation that when you leave a job, your unused PTO would get lumped into your last paycheck.
As you can imagine, corpos have started clawing back that money. This is also egregious since corpos do everything they can to deny that leave in the first place ("You're not sick, you can still work." "Someone already is taking off that week so you can't. No I don't care that you already paid for it.")
My boss managed to avoid the legally required sick days that are given at the start of the year by rolling sick time and vacation time into the same PTO policy which is accrued every pay period.
Hey if they're doing that it means the sick time can't be denied when you quit. He basically decided to shoot himself in the foot with wages in order to deny you like three hours of early sick time every year
On the other hand I've found that people with a single PTO bucket tend to avoid taking time off work when they're sick so it doesn't eat into potential vacation time.
Same in Virginia, anytime I have ever been laid off I got all of my PTO. In fact last time I was laid off I had 600+ hours of PTO, I bought a new car because mine was dying and had money left over
It's so cool and fun how we have all our basic workers' rights split between state borders so some people just have a worse quality of life for absolutley no reason lmao
Californian checking in here with like 350 hours of banked PTO. I used to get paid out annually for extra hours that would normally just get rolled over and disappear in the new year, but they changed the rules to just increase our maximum PTO. So another year or two of no vacations if I want to start collecting that extra pay check again.
My company has pretty much the same policy with a max amount you can carry over from year to year, but California laws say you can't have PTO time taken away from you and it needs to be paid out
Yeah, but "not accruing" isn't the same as "taken away" legally so the max doesn't cause you to start getting paid. We have to actively get it paid out by choice before it maxes out or it goes into the void before we ever "get" it
For sure not 1:1, we get all our hours on Jan 1st so there isn't a sense of monthly accrual. I know California has a minimum number of sick time that has to be given though, so I'd be curious how that might conflict with the "not accruing" set up.
Paying out accrued sick time is a ridiculous concept to me. It's effectively insurance - if you're sick, you can recover without losing income. It's not just extra money that everyone gets.
Vacation, yes, because you're supposed to take a certain amount of vacation every year and if you don't, then the time/money is still owed to you.
That kind of policy incentivizes companies to only provide a minimal amount of sick time. Say you get 5 days a year. Fine for a lot of healthy adults, but if you have a bad year or a chronic illness, you get punished for being sick more often with unpaid sick days. For the intent of sick time - to allow people to recover from illness without financial burden - I think having a generous bank of time that does not get paid out is much better. If it's going to get paid out if unused, then you may as well just bundle it with vacation days.
Ten is the legal minimum in Australia and it has to roll over to the next financial year. They have to be separate as it count towards super and attendance pay but doesn't has the 17.5% loading of annual leave .
Not uncommon to have 20 or 30 days bank up and that shouldn't disappear because you leave
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u/Luutamo 1d ago
I think this comic might be too American for me to understand