They told her that a recent change in policy would mean she would only be paid for a maximum of 30 of those days.

I told her that alone would be enough to make me sick to my stomach for about 125 days (pretty much an entire school year), after which I would be ready to retire.

Luckily she is at least aging gracefully and goes to the gym daily. She's been collecting that sweet defined benefit pension for 25 years and will probably get another 10 out of it at least.

Sick days are not holiday/vacation, and have additional restriction on use where they exist instead of combined PTO. But, in any cases there wasn't an accrual limit here, they just had a limit on cash out at separation.

I've personally had a year where I only took 8 days of vacation and I'm already regretting it a few months into the next year.

I worked at a place where we got bought out and the new owners tried to give us 2 extra weeks of vacation a year. We all laughed. Because nobody was getting to take the 2 weeks they already had.

These days with pooled sick and vacation/personal, my personal experience suggests 20 or so days as a starting point for large-ish tech companies. I'm sure there are some/many that give less but I know what I've personally seen that wasn't considered extraordinarily generous.

These are separate from PTO. At the very minimum, I would expect 10 PTO days in addition to 8 sick days. You might lose some goodwill if you max out your sick day use, but you are owed those days by law regardless.

Single digit vacation days would be insane. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Personally, I like to let them accrue so I can take one very long holiday overseas every couple of years. I'm lucky to have a good immune system that leads to only missing maybe a single day a year due to sickness, allowing the others to be used for last-minute errands and mental health days.

I think you've got it backwards.

The issue is that too many companies in position of power too readily screw over their employees from whom they expect loyalty but give none.

That said, I'm not a fan of the combined system. In a lot of other ways, we expect employers to accommodate employees who may have issues of various kinds. Accommodating employees who get sick more often seems a reasonable extension of that. (And I say that as someone who, touch wood, has largely benefited from a combined system over the past decade or so.)

Because the alternative to being in bed with the flu is being at work with the flu, and the employer doesn't want to catch the flu? It kinda makes utilitarian sense.

As I said, I'm not a fan of the combined vacation and sick time in any case (in part for the reason you say). And, yes, people will drag themselves into work because they don't want to lose a vacation day.

If you hoard your PTO in case you get sick, you don't get to enjoy vacations.

There's a middle ground, but the spot where you draw the line and say "I need to save this many days in case I get sick" is going to be different for everyone, and most people are not going to calculate it correctly.

Not to mention the employee isn't incentivized properly here. The employee that takes too much vacation and goes to work sick, they're not the one who pays the cost of them going to work sick, it's the other employees who do. So a combined PTO scheme like this actually incentivizes employees to err on the side of taking more of it as vacation than they should.

This may seem like a description of some quaint and fantastical world in which people are considerate of their coworkers and they don't dishonestly use sick time for vacation, but there's your answer.

Thanks for the explanation, though I have to say I could've done without the whole "being a dick" facet of your comments.

And, if you left for whatever reason, you were paid out your accrued PTO (which often had an accrual cap) but not sick time.

Also, the fact that 125 days pretty much covers her entire working year as a teacher is rather astounding for people who work in the private sector. Most of us have to put in 220+ days each year to justify our salaries.

And that's a full year of "teaching", as in, with a classroom of kids. Teachers usually have a few weeks of training and work during the summer as well. But this is all offset by the fact that they are usually paid less than market wages, even when accounting for benefits. Although, defined benefit plans are becoming rare in both the private and public sector.

right to work or not, is there any state where you have to "legally" give 2 weeks notice? i don't think there is.

IANAL, but there are enforceable terms in employment contracts occasionally. I agree they're rare from my understanding of how things usually wind up shaking out.

In 42 states, you can't fire someone for acting in a way that's compliant with public policy, like for saying "I won't ship these defective airplane parts".

36 states have an "implied contract" exception, meaning that if you've informally written or said that you won't quit or fire without good reason, then you can be bound by that as if it were a contract.

11 states have "good faith" exemptions, meaning you can't fire for mean or selfish reasons, like to avoid paying retirement benefits.

Additionally, Walmart in particular is no stranger to class-action suits brought from it's employees. Given how little Walmart pays the average employee and how profitable it is, this behavior would have a very little and well bounded guaranteed upside (saved money), but a large unknown possible downside (lawsuits, bad PR, etc). When profits are good, that risk reward ratio probably just doesn't look very worthwhile to most companies.

Right to work has to do with if you have to join a union or not if your workplace has one, most states are at will employment.

What you're describing is called "at-will employment" and it is totally unrelated to right-to-work (which has to do with unions and collective bargaining).

At-will employment is the default everywhere in the United States unless an exception is provided by law (Florida is one of a few states with no exceptions), or if the contract states otherwise. IE, At-will is the baseline, laws and contracts can add additional requirements.

So, in other words, what you did was not legal, and they totally could have come after you for breach of contract, they just decided not to.

The law says "unless you've explicitly agreed otherwise, you can end an employment relationship with no conditions". This person explicitly agreed otherwise, then reneged on their agreement, that's a breach of contract.

If both provisions were in the contract, then what you're stating would suggest that the company could not refuse to pay for the unused vacation time, either. But, again, that doesn't appear to be the case here.

For completeness's sake, there are 38 states with an "implied contract exception" to at-will employment, where statements in the employee handbook would count as implied contract and be binding, but Florida is not one of them.

The statements in an employee handbook can be binding on the employer, but never the employee. This is well-settled case law in the US. (Whether it is actually binding depends on the specific language used, so I edited my comment from "is" to "can be".)

If the contract says "I will give two weeks notice before I leave" and you sign on the dotted line, then you need to give two weeks notice before you leave or else suffer the penalties described in the contract.

You can't cite laws to get out of contractual obligations unless the contract demands you do something illegal.

Employers cannot get out of legal requirements just by having employees sign contracts. Not all rights can be waived.

> If the contract says "I will give two weeks notice before I leave" and you sign on the dotted line, then you need to give two weeks notice before you leave or else suffer the penalties described in the contract.

Well, it would have to be a valid contract, and the penalties described in the contract would have to be legal (you can't put punitive damages in a contract). If, some time after you are hired, the employer asks you to sign a contract that says that you will give two weeks notice, and you sign on the dotted line, that's not actually a valid contract (because there's no consideration).

> You can't cite laws to get out of contractual obligations unless the contract demands you do something illegal.

In general you can breach any contract, there are many laws which give reasons why a contract would be void, or laws which prevent employers from entering into certain types of contracts, and reasons why a contract would not be enforced or possibly unenforceable.

So, yes, you can cite laws.

That is simply untrue. There are a number of reasons a contract can be deemed invalid or unenforceable. Illegality is only one such reason.

This is so completely wrong that it's almost exactly the opposite of the truth. Two weeks notice is a courtesy except for term-defined employment contracts where the length of employment is an explicit, defined term of finite duration.