He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.
An alternate and equally plausible view is that she had a condition that rendered her borderline ill more than 10 days a year, but couldn't afford to take unpaid leave. So she just 'toughed it out' instead for the remaining days.
Laughing vindictively as you deny a raise to someone isn't something be lauded or emulated under any circumstance.
Contagious cold? A rough day with anxiety/depression? Struggling with the side effects of a new medicine? Hung over from a night of partying?
If the company’s policy is 10 days, then there is zero reason to negatively judge an employee for using those days.
I was also fortunate to attend a university with an honor system, to the extent that exams weren't even allowed to be proctored. Whether you cheated or not was up to you, nobody would know.
I appreciated that system, and have tried to live it long after graduation. I could go on, but it has proved to be more than worthwhile.
No, we don't all get to choose who we are. People don't choose to have depression, or <<insert any chronic illness>>
Otherwise a lot of offices are basically empty at that time, so who cares? As long as they're not coming to work when they're actually sick so they can hoard sick days, does it matter?
I’d rather live in a world where I can believe that most people are trustworthy and only a few are not.
Honor, responsibility, and sacrifice are important in personal relationships. You should still be honorable and reliable in your relationships with each individual within the company.
No. His argument was "she only took 10 sick days, as many as our paid sick days policy", so he deduced she was faking it.
Such reasoning, especially when it affects promotion opportunities etc, is not just without proof, but also immoral, and punishable by law. At least in the civilized western world (Europe) it would be.
Abusing sick leave- depending on the job- has very real consequences for your coworkers and company, if someone absolutely has to pick up your slack.
If it doesn't matter, then the company shouldn't be distinguishing between vacation and sick time off anyway. If it does matter, then personally I wouldn't want to work with someone who would do that.
> Are you telling me that the company is lying about the benefits it provides,
No, I'm telling you that there's a difference in requirements for taking sick leave versus vacation. The only reason that sick leave doesn't have the same requirement as vacation is you don't choose when you get sick. If you take a sick day as a vacation day, you're forcing others to scramble to make up for you not being there.
> Why is it abuse if I use my PTO?
Perhaps you missed my intended emphasis on certain jobs that have time or safety sensitive responsibilities, such as nursing. It may not hurt the company for you to take those 10 days, but it does hurt whoever gets called in to fill in for you when they otherwise would have had off.
Here's a simple, real-world example: A company that runs a group-care home for disabled adults is currently understaffed due to a number of circumstances (the difficulty of the job being the biggest). There are four employees to cover 21 8-hour shifts each week (24 hours a day, 7 days a week total).
If someone calls in sick, the one of the others has to cover the shift. Under no circumstances can the house ever be unstaffed. Aside from a bit of overtime pay, the company isn't hurt, but everyone else is.
Not all jobs are like this. The consequences of taking a sick day as a vacation day (or simply being sick) usually aren't that severe. Maybe it's a manufacturing line and the manager has to step in to fill your role or something. Maybe it has no effect at all on anyone around you. In those cases, maybe it doesn't make sense for the company to distinguish between time off for being sick, and time off for vacation.
> The whole point of PTO is that the company is agreeing to give you 10 days worth of slack.
No, that's only true if the company doesn't distinguish between sick time off and vacation time off. Typically, where I've worked, all PTO was lumped into a single bucket, and no-one really cared. However, that is really more true of white collar work with long timelines and not so much in most other jobs (or the parent post I was replying to).
All three of these paid leave types are limited in number of days per year at my current employer, despite my preference as per another comment for paid sick days to be unlimited. I don't make those rules here.
However there are labour laws in force which protect the right to total (mostly unpaid) sick leave for 26 weeks out of every 12 months, including rights to return to the company afterward. (Special cases allow different totals, sometimes even two years for things like a minor child dying. And yes there are government-paid sickness benefits here in most long-lasting sick leaves.)
I agree that those kinds of statutory long durations are pretty different from the kind of sick leave I think should be unlimited, but having to care about 5 vs 10 vs 15 days total per year is not conducive to a healthy workplace, absent reason to suspect fraud.
Your implication here is that it the the subordinate's job to read the mind of management. She must know what is 'proper' in her manager's mind outside of the explicit rules of the job. Management, however, is allowed to read her state of mind incorrectly and adjust her pay accordingly.
Obviously power imbalances like this exist everywhere, and it's wise to be proactive and careful, but that doesn't mean we should hold up examples like these as just or reasonable outcomes.
But who knows. Maybe one of his employees trying to work through being sick will come in and give him norovirus. A man can hope.
Why should I have to risk getting the flu because of this nonsense?
As an epidemiologist, I hate policies that allow sick days to be converted into something of value, or that put's restrictions in them.
Which a profit-driven entity should care about.
I was putting myself through University and still had about 2.5 years of work. I was taking 12-13 units at night year round. So, there were times when I'd use a sick day for study/project/etc time. But I was lead programmer on a critical system by then (including being on-call) and was my department's de facto liason to the computing center, so I got little friction about it.
That said - it is still ridiculous simply because the doctor can't do anything about whatever I might be most commonly sick for (migraine, flu, bad cold, bad seasonal allergy). I'll happily go to the doctor when I have a broken leg or a heart attack, but I'd prefer to stay home and sleep in a dark room and drink water when I have the flu...
So you don't agree with vharuck who said If a person's sick, they're sick. If they're faking, they're faking?
Are you really suggesting faking sickness, or am I misreading you?
I had a job where all unscheduled days off where taken from sick days based on company policy. Vacation days needed or be scheduled ahead of time therefore people valued sick days a little more than vacation days.
Others just put them all into the same pool. It’s more about what the policy actually is than what you call it.
I think there's a locale difference here. Here in the UK, they very much are the same thing (faking sickness could get you fired if you're somehow found out), and we don't generally treat sick days as a pool to be drawn from.
People should use their sick leave - that's what it's for. This "no raise for using sick leave" argument is no better than the overwork culture that's been discussed at length lately.
Mind you, I'm not an engineer, I'm a teacher. Unless it's seriously contagious or I'm basically unable to function I don't tend to use my sick leave because it's more work to prepare lessons for a replacement teacher than it is to come to work and teach.
A male manager denies a raise to a female engineer on the basis that the female engineer takes 10 sick days per year that their contract says they are entitled to.
Why is it important to emphasise sex in this? Periods.
The experience is different for each person but the fact that they didn't feel able to take 12 may itself be a problem. And even 10 would only allow the taking of a single day each month during the worst symptoms. Whilst at the same time leaving yourself with no days were you to get a cold later in the year.
Fuck. That. Manager.
They care about butts in seats more than results, and they've deliberately sought out the metrics to justify it.
Edit: changed you's to they
One of the reasons I decided not to move to the US after I got my H-1B was because of the parsimonious approach to vacation days. Only 10 days of paid leave, for someone who's moving across the Atlantic. If I wanted to spend some time with my friends and family, it would need to be two weeks to make the flight time worthwhile, and that would take 100% of my vacation for a whole year.
And it was non-negotiable. Vacation increases beyond a one-off for the first year was a perk for tenure, not a negotiable form of compensation. And even if I didn't want to come back to Europe; why would I take a job that only gave me 10 days a year to do with what I want? Life is for living, not just working. It was a crunch point, a decisive factor in not moving to SV for me.
Otherwise, hiring someone presents a gigantic risk for smaller companies. Getting unlucky even once with someone that will use 1-2 years of sick leave (legitimately or not) would be enough to bankrupt them.
In general I think making employers pay for a safety net, instead of funding it from taxes paid by those employers, is universally bad. What it does is make employers discriminate against potential hires likely to need that safety net, which makes those in need even worse off.
It could however be that he's talking about firing the person, in which case it's pretty hard in Germany as well. As far as I know early retirement or a termination from the employee are pretty much the only way. Social security mitigates this risk, however, and the protections are lower for part time/student jobs, so hiring is not made too risky.
Net result it may not actually change much in practice.
How to handle that, more broadly, is the same as how to handle any other pattern of employee misbehaviour: some appropriate level of employee discipline according to the misbehaviour's severity and the history of past incidents, ranging from an informal conversation to what the manager in your story did to firing, with many intermediate possibilities.
Often people who behave unethically at work believe they are getting away with it. But then they wonder why they don't get raises, are passed over for promotions, are let go in the first round of layoffs, and don't have the respect of their peers.
People need explicit negative feedback sometimes, and if bad faith is proven and not reversed quickly, the termination process should start. The doctor's notes are for the category of people that behave unethically regardless of age, and when the latter is suspected, the former can be temporarily appropriate given good reason for suspicion and after trying the direct approach of discussing the problem. I'm a manager and have never requested a doctor's note. I hope never to have to.
If I were this manager's manager, I'd have two people whose performance and attitude I'd need to correct, not one.
Anyway, my preferred rule is unlimited paid sick days, even when vacation days are limited. And yes, I've worked at places that use that rule. Just like you don't get to choose when you get sick, you don't get to choose how severely you get sick when you get sick.
As others have said, a long sickness should not all be at the expense of the employer. But plenty of places have mandatory disability insurance paid for by payroll deductions and employer contributions, including New York and Canada to name two examples I'm aware of.
Anyway, here you can be sick for 5 days in a row (and get 80% of your salary), after that you have to go to a doctor and get a paper that you are in fact sick. Futhermore, you can be sick for 6 times a year, after that you have to talk to the boss and explain yourself. People used this to the maximum, meaning that on top of the 5 weeks per year people got payed vacation, they were all "sick" an additional 6 weeks, always 5 days at a time. The employers can't do anything, as people with permanent employment can't be fired.
I'm down with flu, stomach issues, gout and a few other things far more days in a year than the company's paid sick leave. And while I might not take all of them, and go to work sick, it's within the rights of anybody to do so.
If the company is offering 10 paid sick days, and he is discriminating based on using those, then he should be sued to extinction...
Taking all 10 and just those has no indication on anything