Jonah has a 102 degree fever. He timed this illness perfectly to land right in the beginning of midterms. Poor kid is now looking at a long string of make up exams next week.
We’ve got a 10:00 appointment with the pediatrician, who is going to judge me for not getting him a flu shot this fall.
I’m bracing myself for a “Return to Sender” phone call from Ian’s school.
We can handle these crises, because I’m here. My paying gigs don’t really pay me, so the world isn’t going to fall in, if I don’t submit an article today.
Others have a crappier time dealing with these crises.
Steve has no paid sick days and no personal days. The official rules are that doctors’ appointments and illnesses count as a vacation day, though nice supervisors overlook a lot.
Question of the Day: If you have a proper paying job, how many paid sick days do you get?
Apt. 11d 
I get one sick day a month and I have 80 accumulated sick days.
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I get four hours every two weeks, so about the same. We can use this time to take care of kids, including routine doctor visits. I was not, and my wife was, able to take time after childbirth using sick leave – hers was ‘recovering from delivery’. So the time I took was annual leave.
Hard to know what is the best thing to do. I have read suspicion out of Sweden that employers there are chary of hiring women whose childbearing looks to be ahead of them, for fear of getting hit with the costs of Sweden’s generous newborn entitlements. So, the women who have jobs are well cared for, but it’s maybe harder to get jobs.
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13 sick days a year, and an unlimited number carry over. Most people treat them like a de facto disability policy, and have months accrued by the time they are in their fifties. Most people under 40 use the bulk of any carried over leave as a means obtaining some type of paid parental leave.
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I get 5 days a year and they cannot be carried over.
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4 weeks PTO. My husband gets 2 weeks vacation and 2 weeks sick. I definitely wish he could trade that for four 4 weeks PTO. When the kids were little, we’d have broken even. Now, we’d be way ahead.
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I work 30 hours/week and I get 5 weeks of PTO a year. (that covers vacation and sick days). With the 30 hour schedule, I can often adjust it to work around a day or two of sick-days. (they let me work from home too.) When we experienced a recent serious health crisis involving my daughter, my firm gave me “unlimited leave” for a the year (they let me take off as much as I needed to care for her.) That was a godsend. I can manage the minor illnesses, but would have certainly have to had quit my job if they hadn’t done that for the major crisis.
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My company moved from having explicit sick days to PTO 7 or 8 years ago – the new policy announcement said that they determined that employees used 5 sick days on average, so our PTO time increased by 5 days (I got 4 weeks PTO at the time, now I’m up to 5 weeks). The real challenge of kids’ illnesses is the unpredictability – if I’m sick, I can adjust how much time I take based one how stressed I am at work and do quite a bit of it from home. When the kids are sick, they aren’t nearly as adaptable, and you don’t want to be the person who misses another meeting because of a sick kid.
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I get a sick day a month and can explicitly use them to care for dependents, which was not true until I had my first child. They can be carried over. The whole reason I have my career and have kids is because nothing is going to happen if I’m out even for a week with sick children: I’m not a doctor or a lawyer, nothing is riding on me not being there. That also means I don’t get paid a huge amount and sometimes my job is a little dull, but them’s the breaks. My whole goal is to put myself in a decent position for when I feel like leaning in seriously in 10 years…for now I can’t. I also can get FMLA if there was a serious illness or disability. I realize I am extremely lucky.
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Doctors are often organizing things so that they can be replaced as needed these days. I don’t know what the long term consequence of that new staffing model will be. I would expect a decrease in compensation of doctors as a consequence.
Lawyers involved in specific cases with specific knowledge bases aren’t replaceable, usually, but they’re work is (usually) also not a matter of life and death.
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NY state gives 3.75 hours every two weeks. You can accrue and when eligible for retirment, the days are aconverted to a cash equivalent and amortized and then used to discount health insurance premiums during retirement. Some people accrue a lot, some use as they get it.
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We can only get paid at 50% for ours and that’s to a maximum of $2,500.
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In construction (yes, union construction) you only get paid on the job. No paid sick days, no paid vacation, no paid holidays. A lot of my friends outside of the trades are service industry workers, and they get nothing. At least I have a pension and healthcare. (Well, until running out of banked hours on healthcare during layoff time). White collar professionals have it so much easier when it comes to leave. Most of the rest of us just get laid off.
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Five standard holidays a year, four floating holidays, four weeks PTO which cover illness and vacation time. PTO is capped at no more than 40 hours/month except in extreme circumstances (like hospitalization) and you cannot accrue more than 80 hours total – which means if you go more than six months without PTO you’ll start losing it. (This is especially hard from January – June when so much software/IT work is done, and when teams often can’t take PTO because of pressing deadlines. I regularly see my guys lose their PTO because of slipped release dates and the resulting denied vacations.)
But no one gives me grief if I use my PTO to cover for others who are sick, and in general the policy for working at home is very loose, allowing most of the parents/caregivers to manage illness without taking actual PTO. It’s the flexibility that saves us in the end, much more than the overall PTO allowance.
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We start out at 4 weeks PTO and that increases with seniority. It’s for both sick time and vacation. Because we are a financial institution we can only carry over 5 days to the next year and have to use carry over in the first quarter or lose it. We also have short term disability which is pretty good
Lubiddu, when I was a child my Dad’s union job gave him one week of vacation and that had to be taken during annual plant shut down the last week of July. We considered ourselves lucky and we were.
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Steve gets NO paid sick leave or PTO? That is crazy. I work in state government in Oregon, so covered by a union, which has its benefits (literally) when it comes to this stuff. 1 day of sick leave/month with no maximum carryover. I never use it all (except for when I had my baby) so like today I am technically well enough to go to work, but also have a miserable cough/cold and chose to stay home because I have the time to use. Vacation time = 1 day/month to start plus 3 days/year of personal time. It’s pretty damn good.
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What’s also important is whether the culture where you work is accepting of your utilization of benefits. I’ve seen some women in tech take the contracting route because they got less hassle taking unpaid days off than in dealing with unfriendly management when their children needed them.
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Sorry. I was too vague. He gets 4 week vacation or PTO. He used to get 4 week, plus sick days. They took those away without increasing vacation time. His job pays well, but is very inflexible for sudden emergencies. Few people have kids.
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In addition to accruing sick days, we also have a sick leave bank. Everyone who participates donates a day a year, and then if you get really sick and draw down all of your sick time, you can draw from the bank. The union negotiates and runs that. At my last job (also unionized), we had a similar thing, and I was actually hired to replace a guy who was using the bank. He was able to draw on the bank for several years, until it became clear he wasn’t going to ever be able to return.
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I get 14ish days, which carry over.
But my husband is an tenured academic and, as long as he shows up to teach his classes (total of maybe 5-7 hours/week), no one cares if he takes all the rest of his time off to take care of sick kids. And if he has to reschedule a class once in a while or let a not-too-sick kid sit in the back watching an ipad, that’s fine too.
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I’m a non-tenured, contract academic. I have a 12-month contract with no explicit time off, either vacation or sick time (and duties that require me to work even when classes aren’t in session). For me and my colleagues with similar contracts, we’re at the mercy of our direct supervisors. Mine is great about flexibility, but others have horror stories.
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That’s terrible. I’m a 12-month appointment tenure track librarian. About 20 paid vacation days, 10 official holidays, and accrue about 1 sick day a month. Not as much flexibility as other types of faculty, but I’m able to take time off when needed. I’m so grateful for those benefits – I have three small children.
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“What’s also important is whether the culture where you work is accepting of your utilization of benefits.” Very true. In my shop, if someone is taking something anything close to 13 sick days for any reason other than having a baby, that person is not going to have a career. Best to keep your sick days to fewer than 6 a year if you want to advance.
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Still no one here matches the terms of my niece’s public elementary school teaching position in North Carolina. If she needs to take a personal day, she has to pay for half of the sub. So — you want to take the day off to go to your mother’s funeral, cough up some dough (needless to say, what actually happens is they deduct the sub costs from her paycheck, the “cough up some dough” was just for emphasis).
I don’t know how anyone can read all of these comments and not get very, very angry.
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I get two weeks a year of “personal time” and two weeks of vacation. The personal time is totally at my discretion; they ask that we don’t use it for vacations but no one checks up.
Nothing carries over, which sucks, especially since I’ve had several years when the account I was working on was in such crisis, no way could anyone take time off and I’ve lost a few weeks.
When my dad was sick last year, my manager quietly told not to bill for PTO, which was really nice. I was with my parents for probably seven weeks plus another week for the funeral. I worked remotely as much as I could during that time. If I’d had to to take FMLA, I wouldn’t have been working at all, so it was win/win.
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Unionized faculty and my contract states that I get all of the sick days that I need – literally. If I’m sick enough to need to stay out for longer term, then the disability provisions kick in for long-term leave.
Now that the kids are older, I take maybe two sick days in the average year and those are because I’m too sick to teach. Mike had to stay home from work the other morning during my early morning class (and shave a few hours off his contract) when Youngest sprained her ankle getting off the school bus. He’s hourly, no benefits including no sick leave. That’s been the case since the kids were born so our system always was I’d watch the kids if it didn’t conflict with teaching time because my calling things off inconveniences anywhere from 25-120 people at a go.
If my job had more “on the clock” aspects, I’d have taken a boatload of sick leave days in 2014. I was desperately ill and getting worse for the first five months until I went to the doctor in early May and we figured out it wasn’t just seasonal problems but serious anemia that made it impossible for me to walk from the parking lot to the building doors – about 100 metres — without needing a rest. It wasn’t until well into July that I was passably functional on my feet but I still managed to revise one article and write another during that time because, hey, I could still write and think!
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I’m a unionized legal secretary at a private law firm. At hire all union employees start accruing sick leave at one day per month, can be used in any increment for self, spouse, or dependents. First year employees accrue vacation that adds up to a week if you work full time (the accrual is a multiplier applied to paid hours); second through fifth year, two weeks; sixth through tenth year, three weeks; after ten years, four weeks. All sick leave can be banked/carried over; sick leave accrual over 30 days can be redeemed for cash on request (it’s basically our short-term disability policy). Vacation can only be banked to “your current year allowance plus one week,” but can also be cashed in at “if you take 2 weeks of vacation we will buy back up to two additional weeks of vacation from your bank” although I don’t think anybody has ever done that. All union employees also have one floating holiday per year, accrued on July 1 of each year, must be used during the contract year (July 1 to June 30). If you are sick and run out of sick time, my employer allows use of vacation time on a case-by-case basis. We are allowed to ask other employees to donate sick time to us, too.
In addition our union health insurance premium, which is fully employer paid, includes short-term disability pay but the rate is based on the wage of a grocery clerk, which unfortunately for me means I get about one day’s pay per week when I’m on disability (had surgery last year and the year before). The insurance also covers medical, dental (including orthodontia), vision, and prescriptions and covers your entire family for the same premium (which is fully employer paid anyway). The union also provides each member with a $1,000 life insurance policy for free (basically burial money).
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I believe I get 10 PTO a year without penalty, which basically is about 3 a term (trimesters). I will take 1-2 a term, sometimes none. If the kids are sick, they can stay home by themselves now, especially for 4 hours, which is the maximum time I’d be gone if I just went in and taught. One year I think I took 11 days and my dean was very nice about it and didn’t penalize the 11th. E was sick often that year as we were learning to manage his asthma.
My husband gets 2 days a month of vacation and I don’t know how many sick days. He took 13 days off Nov-Dec when he broke his collarbone. I think they roll over, which is why he could do that. If he takes a day off to take care of a sick kid, he is allowed to take that as a sick day, which is nice.
When I broke my ankle, I was offered the opportunity to take the term off, and I refused. I was already bored to tears after 2 weeks off my feet, and I knew I’d probably be out of the cast by midterms.
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More leave than I can use and it carries over. However, there are specific duty days that I have to be present and in the year that my daughter graduated from college on one of those days and I took my son to enroll in college for 3 of the other days, my dean said I’d have to get permission from the president of the college to take off the days (even if I had many banked). So I guess I’d be fine sick, not so much if I had a another big event in that calendar year.
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1.33 days per month. Had to use them ALL when first child was born (when I earned fewer sick days per month) because SUNY campuses allow presidents to grant additional sick leave at whim in principle, our president has never granted leave for childbirth. My dept accommodated by assigning me a non-teaching assignment I could complete while on leave, doing administrative work that matter for accreditation, etc.
Second child? I had enough leave stockpiled, but my dept didn’t have enough staff. When I almost died due to abruption and child was born more than 2 months early? Chaos. Sympathy, but chaos. No other female tenure track faculty. No empathy. Perhaps more than letter of the law concern, but….man, it was a REAL problem the following semester, when I wasn’t yet 100% and had no immediate illness to point to.
(Child fine now. PTSD issues for me subsiding. Excellent health insurance covered extensive NICU costs. We are blessed. Still anxious and uncertain re: tenure/professional ramifications, but aware of how fortunate we have been.)
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Wow
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“our president has never granted leave for childbirth”
wtf?
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When I left my last software engineering job in 2012, I had around 30 days of PTO per year, with no differentiation between sick days and vacation days, and a max of 5 carry-over days year-to-year. I had a lot of seniority, but new hires were given 20 days, which expanded to 25 days after 5-ish years and 30 after 8-ish years with the company. I felt this was quite generous, and the idea that I’d never be able to match it elsewhere probably dissuaded me from going back on the job market, despite a somewhat uncompetitive salary.
I remember sitting in a benefits planning committee around 2006 with the CFO, HR, and various representatives from different departments, and it was fascinating to see the vacation policy (then only one year old) and insurance options worked out. Highlights I recall now:
The CFO did not care at all how much time off people took, and might have been happy giving everyone 3 months of vacation. The thing he cared about was accrued vacation days that would add to how much the company owed employees who hadn’t taken their PTO. He was firmly against accrual systems, or roll-over days. This set him squarely at odds with the employee from sales, as apparently sales people (particularly remote ones) took all the time on or off that they needed informally, and used accrued PTO mainly as a severance bonus/cushion.
The previous year’s institution of a formal PTO policy had really messed up part-time employees due to poor math on the committee’s part — they’d somehow figured that years had 10 months and calculated appropriately.
There was no paid maternity leave, so the issue of burning through sick days before short-term disability kicked in was a problem. I think I recall that having PTO instead of a sick/vacation division actually gave employees a bit more flexibility there.
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My wife (software engineer at IBM) gets unlimited sick days, 5 personal-choice holidays (though only 4 designated holidays rather than the 8ish usual for the US), and 20 vacation days, which she only just hit after fifteen years with the company. There’s no roll-over of vacation days from year to year, though you it’s accepted to use a bit of roll-over during the first month of the year subject to manager discretion.
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As a law firm partner, I don’t have any fixed number of sick days, or vacation days either. At the end of the year, my bonus and my next year’s salary depends on production, measured by hours billed and business originated. If I could produce good numbers on those metrics by working six months a year (which would be very difficult, since clients tend to expect constant availability), no one at the firm would say boo.
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Law is a challenging profession re sick days/benefits/etc because it’s much more difficult to utilize leverage. More than other professions they are hiring “you” specifically. “I want y81 for my xyz because of his well known expertise”. And there are fewer opportunities for recurring work.
Depending upon how profits are shared, it’s more of an “eat what you kill” structure than public accounting firms (excluding the deals side – that tends to be more personality/expertise-based compared to tax or consulting. Audit is more of a commodity due to fee pressures/regulatory compliance).
Of course there’s a huge upside potential depending upon the firm/area of expertise, but you definitely pay your dues along the way.
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So, might the next topic be a discussion of the different sick leave policies, and what might work best?
Say, are sick leave + vacation days better, or PTO? What of being compensated for unused leave (sick or vacation)? And, how about being paid based on productivity independent of time?
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I’m a TT professor at a private college, officially on a 9 month contract (which is actually two 15 week periods to cover the fall and spring semesters). No sick day policy (or vacation, of course). I usually feel comfortable canceling each of my classes two times a semester and build in flexibility with that in mind; I try to avoid that in the first half of the semester in case something disastrous happens later (two kids, no local people to take care of sick kids other than me). Luckily in my department it isn’t a big deal to create an out of class assignment, or show a movie, if sick, and I can bring my kids to my classes with their tablets (now that they are 6 and 8) in a pinch, and have colleague who will watch them in their office/classes if my class or their illness makes other arrangements difficult. But it still stresses me out and totally wrecks my normal single-parenting rhythm.
I love the winter break and early summer when school is still in session and having sick children isn’t hugely stressful. I just had a series of three weeks with illness going through my family – first me, then one kid, then me again, then the other kid. It was exhausting, and I was just lucky the semester hadn’t started yet.
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I work for a large corporation in the middle of the country. As a new employee, you get 15 days vacation plus three holiday credits (to make up for three Federal holidays not taken). At 12 years, you jump to 20 days vacation plus the holiday credits. You have to get to 25 years of service before you get another week. We do not have a specific limit on sick days. If you are out for five days in a row, you need a doctor’s note to return. Otherwise, taking too many sick days is seen as a performance problem.This can be a bit of an issue, because it depends on your relationship with your manager.
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Today is may be more appropriate to talk about snow days than sick days.
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