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Comment by brational | Hacker News Reader

> If your vacation and sick pay recently went to PTO instead, you should be looking.

Can you explain this one? I don't even come close to using my sick time up. I'd much rather have them give it as one giant PTO bucket (unless you're implying PTO is less in total than vacation + sick).

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Depending in the laws of your locale, an employer may be required to pay for an employee's vacation balance. PTO was formulated primarily to evade this restriction and to provide the means to reduce the company's accounting liabilities. While it was sold to you on the basis of flexibility, it really is a significant reduction in your benefits.

Think about how salary works. If you work as an exempt salaried employee even one minute during any given week, you are supposed to be paid for the whole week. That is why vacation time used to be granted as an integral number of weeks. Converting weeks of vacation into hours of paid time off is simply another step on the slippery slope to treating some salaried workers like wage workers, without any of the additional rights or protections.

Also, anecdotally speaking, every time I have experienced the conversion (3 times), new PTO total has been less than old vacation + sick, and it has always resulted in fewer actual days spent on vacation. The PTO conversion is always the company trying to cut benefit costs quietly without triggering a mass exodus.

I see. I was previously at a company with PTO and when I left I was paid the balance. At my new company I have both, but unless I use sick time basically as '2nd vacation pool' (potential ethical issues etc) I actually end up with less time off.

Your company was not legally obligated to pay you the PTO balance. It may be written in to the company handbook that they will, provided that you give sufficient notice, but they did not have to pay. Disposition of PTO is not covered by the same laws as vacation or sick leave benefits, so the company can basically do whatever it wants with it. If it were a mass layoff rather than one guy leaving, they wouldn't pay. In that case, they wouldn't have to worry about the remaining employees complaining or using their PTO as they accumulate it, rather than risk leaving value on the table.

As a corollary, if you have PTO and intend to leave a company, use it up before giving notice.

And we haven't even touched on other issues. People with PTO may be less likely to stay home when they are sick, because it reduces the amount of planned leave they can take. This results in more contagion in the workforce.

There are very good reasons for paid vacation and paid sick leave to be different classes of benefit. But in this case, it is simply a coal miner's canary. A company transitioning to PTO is reducing their labor costs by reducing the benefits of their productive employees. Look carefully to determine whether any effort has been made to reduce overhead. PTO by itself is not an unambiguous signal. If execs are still giving themselves bonuses while your earned leave becomes PTO, they probably just reassigned the value of your benefit to themselves, and it's time to look for a new employer before they come up with another bright idea, like stack ranking.

This criticism also applies to some extent to "we don't worry about leave" companies. I haven't ever worked for one, so I can't say for certain.

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