Re:EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home
by mikem170 on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:30PM
(#25307423)
Point taken, I understand what you're saying and that plays into the mix. My next thought is that having the separate sick days with the expectation that people will only use them when needed introduces several less-than-optimal problems: 1) some employees will lie about being sick, 2) some employers won't trust their employees, interjecting the need for unnecessary dacotr's notes, etc and 3) some employees who follow the rules will resent those who don't.
Everyone getting the same combined amount of day mitigates the above, with the understanding that might be 45 PTO days instead of 30 vacation + 30 sick. This would seem to leave the problem of people who are genuinely sick for longer 15 days, under the 30+30 they'd not be dipping into their vacation days as quickly.
There will always be some number of people who run out of sick days, no matter how many you have. Maybe the policies around short-term disability should be adjusted, and the more drastic situations handled with that (requiring doctor visits, etc).
I'm currently reading "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber, something that rings a lot of bells for me. I'll admit to having an very questioning attitude about workplace culture lately :-)
If you have a joined pool of 60 PTO days per year, that means more days off than separate pools of 30 vacation days + up to 30 sick days. All else being equal, of course an employee would prefer to have more days off. However, all else would not be equal. The PTO days are a cost to the employer, which means the employer can afford to shell out less in other forms of compensation. Think of the job market as a market where employers compete for employees (and vice versa, but that's tangential to the point here). Employers offer different forms of compensation to employees: salary, bonuses, paid vacation days, etc. If the government suddenly mandated that employers must give all employees more vacation days, then the employers could afford to pay out less in other forms of compensation. Sure, in the short run the employer would pay out more to employees and be less profitable, but over time they would balance out this cost by paying less in other benefits.
In other words, if you take the perspective of an employee with a 5+ year time horizon, the total amount of compensation received from the employer would not be expected to increase as a result of those government-mandated extra vacation days. What would change, however, is the incentive of people to go to work sick and infect others. If sick days cost you money, then you are incentivized to go to work sick. As a result, more people get sick. That would be bad. So from a risk/reward pespective, we have a reward of ~0, and a risk of more sickness.