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.")
Oof. I work in Europe and it's a similar system, except that sick days are always on the cost of the employer (but you need a doctor's note). After a certain point, health insurance takes over and it's not on the employer anymore.
Where I work we also don't pay back vacation days that weren't used, but we approve 99% of vacation requests and it's very explicitly stated that you need to use them up before your contract ends. Only those who never read their contract and don't pay attention during onboarding miss it and that's on them.
Part of the problem here is that corpos do everything they can to stop you from using PTO to begin with. It wouldn't be a problem if the system were the same but we could use our PTO freely.
They will use any reason they can to deny you your PTO, and when they can't deny it they implicitly threaten you that people who aren't "team players" are more likely to get laid off.
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u/Luutamo 1d ago
I think this comic might be too American for me to understand