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.")
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/-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.")