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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

California, Illinois, Montana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Rhode Island.

I have seen corporate officers pursued successfully for unpaid PTO after corporate insolvency in Illinois.

Side note: This is why “unlimited vacation” is a bit quirky as a benefit. Ask what the minimum is, because that’s what is going to be paid out when you seperate.

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Colorado as well: https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/blog/finance_etc/2015/09/...

Fantastic news. Only 42 states to go.

The article says they're paying out PTO in California because it's required by law. My guess is the severance is to compensate employees in states where it's not required. They could decide to pay out PTO and take away the severance, which would likely be worse for most of them.

I guess they've missed the big picture that the company is bleeding money so fast that they had to lay off 15% of their workforce.

Severance is to get people to sign exit agreements. They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re going to have people agree not to sue them and potentially other things (like clawbacks for criticizing the company publicly).

My understanding is that California and maybe Nebraska also prohibit use it or lose it policies—although they do allow AFAIK limiting accrual to some maximum number of days

> although they do allow AFAIK limiting accrual to some maximum number of days

How is that not “use it or lose it”?

Really the default assumption should be that the employee desires to use his/her PTO and if they were unable to do so that situation would be a failure on the companies part (not having enough coverage, over promised a schedule, etc) and any PTO that failed to roll over should be paid out.

In my view that puts the incentives in the right places, firms that are unwilling to abide by those clear rules are likely trying to game the PTO system anyway and are committing a variety of fraud when they hire someone under those false terms.

Legal in California: You earn 2 vacation days per month, to a max of 24. Hired in January, never use PTO, by December you have 24 days banked. In January you fail to earn PTO because you hit the cap. Total balance at end of January: 24 days banked.

Illegal in California: You earn 2 vacation days per month, and they are "use it or lose it." Hired in January, by December you have 24 days banked and never use them. The next January, your existing PTO balance is set to 0 and you are not compensated for the unused days. Balance at end of January: 2 days banked.

The legal distinction is that your employer can decide not to give you PTO for any arbitrary reason (there is no legal requirement to give any at all), but they cannot take back PTO that has already been paid out.

I'd still call this "use it or lose it", just a less harsh version than a yearly reset to zero.

I've never heard of anywhere doing this sort of yearly zero-reset anyway. Wouldn't this make it literally impossible to use the vacation earned during the last pay period of the year?

Typically the yearly reset is for awarded (as opposed to earned) PTO. e.g. On Jan 1 you reset, but back to 15 days, and you have the rest of the year to use it. I'm guessing this is also legal in California because PTO is not earned in this model.

Speaking from experience. The PTO is given up-front. (Say by quarter.) There may be a grace period into the next calendar before the previous year's PTO is zeroed out. And you can potentially, by policy, go negative.

It's not uncommon for companies to have some variant of this.

I agree that it's not all that different from accrual caps in practice but does need a little more management to avoid losing time.

ADDED: Accrual caps are also typically more along the lines of vacation earned over 18-24 months in my experience.

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