Basically because that's what your contract agreed to. I have something similar. I have 3 sick days per year and if I don't use them they become vacation PTO for next year. Regular pto doesn't roll over but sick days do.

OK. It seems like it would be clearer if those were just called accruable vacation days or something.

They are often separated by the employer, including different rollover amounts and rules, for..... reasons I guess?

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. With combined sick + vacation, usually called PTO, workers are more likely to try to save PTO for vacation and work when they are sick, and they end up transmitting infections to other workers. Personally, I am a big fan of separate vacation + sick leave.

The counterargument is that some people abuse sick time. (I think there have even been studies that show a large excess of sick days on Monday.) And from a purely utilitarian perspective, why should an employer care if you're in bed with the flu or climbing a mountain somewhere?

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.)

> And from a purely utilitarian perspective, why should an employer care if you're in bed with the flu

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.

What I meant was that you're not working so you should simply forgo that day of climbing the mountain. It's a day off work in any case.

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 use up your combined PTO on vacation, you don't have any left when you actually get sick.

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.

People can typically borrow against future PTO if they get sick and don't have time banked. Again, I don't advocate a combined system and I actually agree the incentives are mostly wrong (for everyone except those who abuse sick time when they're tracked separately which are probably less common among readers here than in the general population).

Indeed, approximately 40% of sick days are used to create effectively 3day weekends (Monday or Friday)

I get the joke but I’ve seen references to at least one study that found 35% of sick days were taken on Monday which is more than random chance.

This doesn't seem odd to me. People go out on weekends and are in contact with people they aren't normally around.

People get sick doing stupid stuff in the weekend?

I honestly don't understand the concept of sick days. If you happen to get sick more often than you have the day... What then? Are you expected to come in to work? Hwy on earth would _anyone_ want that, including your employer? I've been fortunate enough to only work places where you can "wfh" if sick and do as little work as you feel up to, so I honestly don't know how it works in the typical case.

This doesn't seem so hard to understand. In the limit, you can see that an employer can't keep paying someone who is sick all the time and who is not working. The employer is providing a guideline about the amount of sick time it can accommodate before the situation becomes untenable.

So to answer my direct question... That means that the employee should come into work and get everyone else sick? Maybe I'm dumb, but I'm still not understanding how that benefits the employer. "Tenable" or not, it's the reality of the situation, and what you're describing sounds more like saying that the employment of that person isn't viable due to their health issues. Which has nothing to do with pretending that the employee isn't sick.

It means that: 1. The employee doesn't come to work sick because that is not considerate. 2. The employer provides a reasonable amount of sick time which is compatible with her staying in business. 3. The employee uses the sick time when she is sick. 4. When the employee is sick for longer than she has sick time, she can ask the employer for some accommodation which the employer can grant at her discretion.

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.

Okay, that kind of makes sense: formal sick days are the amount of times you can call in sick no questions asked, above which you need to communicate with your employer.

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

If the employer is applying a limit to how many you're allowed to take then they're acknowledging that they're really vacation days (that you can take at short notice). Otherwise there would be no limit, because it's not like you control how often you get sick.

No, but you can go on short-term (or long-term) disability at many companies. There's an unfortunate pooling of sick time/personal time/vacation time at many companies today. But, in the US, it used to be absolutely the norm to have separate PTO and sick days and you were only expected to use the sick days if you were sick. (And they typically didn't roll over.)

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

Not really. The point of calling them sick days is that there is an understanding that an employee will use them only if she is sick. The limit is there because the business needs someone doing the job and after a person is sick for long enough, the business will have to find a replacement.