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.")
It's also worth noting that many white collar jobs are instituting "unlimited PTO" which means, by their description, you can take time off as you need.
What they don't specify is that you still need to get this PTO approved and it will only be approved as time allows.
And time never allows.
And since you aren't actually accruing PTO, there's no liability and nothing to pay out if the person leaves the company.
Did you really think you could just take whatever amount of PTO you wanted and not need approval? Like you would just say "40 years of PTO see y'all later!"
No one actually thinks that, don't be absurd. But it's not unreasonable to think "oh, this has unlimited PTO where my last job maxed at 40 hours of PTO, so this means my yearly vacation can be a week and a half instead!" Or "oh thank God, I don't need to choose between getting and recovering from a major surgery or affording food".
You're one of those people who hears that some European country has unlimited sick leave and thinks "well then why doesn't everyone just claim they're sick for the entire year?" As if smarter people than you haven't already thought of that.
Why would they call it "unlimited" if they don't plan on even giving you any at all? The defense you're giving for it is an extreme that never happens.
What actually happens is people get no PTO at all.
It's like getting the choice of getting 3 weeks PTO or a "mystery box" which contains anywhere between 0 to actually infinity PTO. Do you honestly think the company would put infinity PTO in that box?
EDIT: and just to add, what "unlimited PTO" actually is is "discretionary PTO", and that doesn't sound as good to employees as "unlimited".
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u/Luutamo 1d ago
I think this comic might be too American for me to understand