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.")
This is the best part. Then you can apply for "donated leave" which HR must approve. The catch is that your fellow employees can't donate their sick leave.
They can only donate the few types of paid non-sick leave like vacation or comp time that they have.
Some liberal states have state supported programs that can supplement you if you have an injury or illness or short term disability, but they don't pay your full wage and are of limited duration.
It’s more common that you get disciplinary action taken. I once worked a ten hour shift with the stomach flu because my work basically told me I was going to get fired if I left because I didn’t have enough sick time
This is especially common in public schools. Teachers often also don't get "vacation" PTO because of how the school calendar works, so only sick leave.
I've regularly seen teachers get cancer, which needs months and months of time to get through the treatments and chemo, and there will be huge campaigns to get all the other teachers to donate their sick days to the teacher with cancer. And yes. You can "run out" of sick days, even with cancer, and then you're just fired.
Last place I was at, everyone got 5 sick days per year, and yes, we were asked to donate some of those days.
Teachers. Notoriously working with one of the healthiest, non-snot-covered populations.
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u/-non-existance- 1d ago
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.")