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Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think PTO subsuming sick leave ought to be illegal. I've seen multiple people with bright, red noses in the office unable to function much but won't go home because they can't afford to take the day off and they already have plans to take PTO two months out.

Why should I have to risk getting the flu because of this nonsense?

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In Sweden at least, it ("PTO subsuming sick leave") is illegal. Vacation days (of which minimum is 25 for full time employees, but often 30 or more) are a completely separate thing from sick days. When you're sick, you're sick. The employer pays for the first 14 days (minus a deduction of a fifth of a average week's pay and 20% per day) and the state pays after that. Those 14 days are per incident, not per year, and being sick is not a valid reason for letting someone go. If you happen to be sick during your vacation, that too counts as sick days and not vacation days. All of this is by law.

I find int helpful for companies to convert unused sick time into vacation time at a rate like 2/3. This provides less incentive for faking sick.

Alternately, it incentivizes coming in sick and making your co-workers sick.

As an epidemiologist, I hate policies that allow sick days to be converted into something of value, or that put's restrictions in them.

I understand hating that from a health perspective, but for a profit-driven entity there's no resolving this issue without compromise. Sick time will always get abused by someone, so you might as well provide some incentive to not abuse it.

That's one possibility. But there's also the possibility that encouraging presenteeism (which is what incentivizing hoarding sick days is) results in a net loss of productivity as sick employees both half-ass their work and also get their coworkers sick.

Which a profit-driven entity should care about.

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