Workers in California will soon receive a minimum of five days of paid sick leave annually, instead of three, under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Wednesday.
The law, which takes effect in January, also increases the amount of sick leave workers can carry over into the following year. Newsom said it demonstrates that prioritizing the health and well-being of workers “is of the utmost importance for California’s future.”
“Too many folks are still having to choose between skipping a day’s pay and taking care of themselves or their family members when they get sick,” Newsom said in a statement announcing his action.
Baby steps I suppose. Currently I have 11 guaranteed and further based on company discretion. Not something i lose sleep over.
Pretty sure it’s 15 days in the rest of the world.
five fucking sick days is still COMICALLY AND DISGUSTINGLY low. FUCK this out of control capitalism bs
Can employers say you can use your pto for sick time or does it have to be in addition to pto?
Since there’s no minimum PTO requirement, yes but it has to be marked as sick time. Most employers in a state like California though know that they’re going to be the bottom of the barrel if they don’t offer more so they do.
The company I work for just merged PTO and sick time into one. Every 40h you gain an additional hour of PTO, so every two months you get 1 more sick/PTO day.
I think it’s in addition. I say that because I worked for my company in two different states and they have a special PTO category in their time tracking / HR software for CA sick time.
LoL that’s still so few… it’s a step in the right direction but also I would argue a huge amount of employees over there are likely contractor tech workers who if my contract is anything to go off of… literally don’t get any sick days just infinite unpaid days off that they don’t actually want you to take any of unless the company needs to save a few dollars. I haven’t seen a doctor in years and pretty sure I have a cancer spot on my leg… but oh well don’t have insurance that is any good so I’ll just die I guess and my dad and incubator can be upset their one good kid failed to make it rich and support either of them.
Here in Argentina is 3 months or year if you’ve been working 5 years or less, 6 months if you’ve been working more than 5 years.
It’s not uncommon (but not required by law) some reduction of pay for time extensions.
Five days? Even a lot of smaller, unregulated businesses here in the Phillipines offer way more than that.
From what kind of sickness they expect to recover in 5 days? Cut finger?
i guess you could get the flu (if it’s not too bad - once had it for about two weeks several years ago).
but then you better NOT need anything else, all year. hopefully you don’t have kids either.
These are state-mandated days off, which are in addition to any provided by the workplace.
In NY state for instance, our employees have an entire extra week off work they can take than elsewhere in the company. If they don’t use these days, they are paid out for them at their normal pay rate.
Usually those other days though are just vacation days.
Most other countries have those days on top of unlimited sick time.
Those are specifically sick days in NY State.
Good move from Gavin.
What kind of success is that? Asking this coming from a country where we have 6 weeks of sick days before the income is covered by the health care system.
If you tell someone who is starving that you won’t give them any food, they might decide there’s nothing left to lose and try to fight you for their survival.
If instead you give that person just a bit of food - not enough to actually feed them, just enough to give them hope of satiation - rather than getting a knife in the ribs you might just get a grateful handshake and thanks.
They’ll still starve, but with far less struggle.
It’s that kind of success.
I have no idea. Answering this coming from a country where social security will cover income after 3 days of sickness.
Small. It’s one state and anywhere run by Republicans is stuck at the federal minimum of 0. This number will never go higher because Republican legislators won’t vote for it because they hate workers, and Democratic legislators are from states that already implemented higher wages and sick days so it’s a red state problem.
It’s the same way with cannabis legalization and I expect they’ll do the same with abortion.
Ok, I understand how sick days work in USA, and while I dislike the idea, I get it from that point of view.
However… carrying over sick days?! That’s where it fails to make any sense. Rewarding people who are not sick… by allowing them to be more sick? Thanks for nothing I guess. Wouldn’t it make more sense to give extra sick days to the people who are more sick than others? Accruing sick days will obviously result in people wanting to use their sick days.
So this system really encourages people to advantage of the system, and the whole thing is soo far away from actually wanting to minimize sick days.
The proper way to minimize sick days is to let sick people stay the fuck away. Even if you have to pay them to stay away, that cost will be recouped by all the other people who don’t get sick due to some jackass creeping into the office while being sick, because he can’t afford to stay at home.
By having a fixed no. of 5 sick days and encouraging people to use 5 sick days, you’ll obviously have 5 sick days for every employee. And then some for when they’re actually sick.
I am allowed unlimited paid sick days, but yet I have less than 5 sick days annually. Probably closer to zero. Except for covid two years ago which took 3 (working) days and a weekend and was fully reimbursed by the government to my employer anyway.
The way this is done generally is that when someone has been sick for more than a few days, the government will refund up to the unemployment rate to the employer, so they can maintain the employment relationship without having to worry about massive costs. This is a thousand times better for employers and the state and the employees than having to terminate and employ staff constantly due to some artificial “no. of sick days”.
So what if employees take advantage of the system if they still get their work done? If they don’t get their work done, that’s when a manager can step in.
Also 5 sick days a year is abysmal. I’d expect the sick days to get carried over where your sick leave is that low.
The idea of carrying over sick days is bizarre. Sorry Dave, we know you’re fighting cancer, but you shouldn’t have had time off for the flu in the last few years and carried the days over, get back to your desk.
You have it backwards, are you under the impression that you are allocated X amount of days until retirement?
Sick days are accrued each year, if you can carry them over then every sick day you didn’t use gets added to your current year.
“Dave” could have saved up sick days, from the past years to get more full-time pay. However the fact that he didn’t, does not mean that he gets less sick time accrued this year.
This criticism is dumb.
Carrying over sick days is fine because the employer already alloted pay for that. Sick days are no different than vacation days from a fiscal perspective, the only difference is you don’t need to schedule them and/or there may be specific laws about them.
You then claim “accruing sick days will make people want to use them”-
- No. In fact the converse is true, sick days that don’t carry over pressures employees to take them. Because you are basically losing a vacation day, you would be an idiot to not use all 5 days each year. (In case you are confused, no you don’t actually have to be sick to use sick days, many companies have a “don’t ask” policy.)
- This doesn’t really matter since in the US virtually every employer will cash out the sick time at the end of employment so it costs the same anyway, because as already mentioned the money has already been allocated.
I just think it’s silly to allow employers to quantify bodily functions.
“To all employees: You can use the restroom 3 times weekly. We acknowledge that this isn’t enough, so If you do not use the restroom 3 times weekly, you can carry over the unused restroom visits to next week.”
It is just a small amount of PTO and fine if that’s how it’s used, but it doesn’t make any sense in helping people cope wih or prevent sickness.
I understand the reason to minimize the liability for the employers, but having a rigid system like this only creates needless frustration and conflicts when people are actually sick.
You literally claimed yourself that 5 days a year is plenty for yourself (via stating that you don’t use that many days). So this supposed acknowledgement “that this isn’t enough”, doesn’t appear to be true. You apparently think that it is enough and would even be able to save up days just from your normal behaviour.
“I understand the reason to minimize the liability for the employers”- the liability? Do you mean the expenses of paying for indefinite leave? Where does liability come anywhere into this? Do you know what that word means?
You seem to be arguing for indefinite sick time (which is actually paid by taxpayers because businesses can’t pay people who produce nothing), but doing it by attacking a more beneficial system for employees (apparently because you have no idea what you are talking about).
I think you’re missing the point. A fixed quantity of sick days will ensure that people show up sick for work when they run out of sick days. It will also create needless conflicts and mistrust. It will also cause a higher cost for the companies.
And… It does not stop sickness.
All of this because someone is dead set on quantifying something that should not be quantified.
Call it paid time off or add it to paid holidays, but don’t pretend that this is better system to address sickness for anyone.
- edit: And yes I use the word" liability" correctly. By having a fixed count of potential sick days, employers do accrue a balance of potential cost to paying employees being sick. Otherwise you’re not keeping account of the potential future finalcial liabilities and screwing your own tax return at the same time. It’s obviously deductable before tax.
“I think you are missing the point”
Nope, you specifically complained about having more flexible days by allowing people to carry over sick time. Now presumably you think that it’s better to have unlimited sick time, but at no point have you ever actually said that. All you have done is whine about carrying over sick time.
“A fixed quantity of sick days will ensure that people show up sick for work when they run out”
Of course sick time is necessarily equal to or less than total employment time (eventually you will have to work at some point, so clearly any set number of sick time can theoretically be insufficient). Now having 40 hrs of sick time each year is by your own admission plenty for you and plenty for most people. If companies were actually losing appreciable amounts of money on their sick time policy (like you claim ) they would change it. It’s easy to see that “Flu costs 12 billion $/pa” and forget that the US economy is larger by a factor of 1000 ( so less than .1 percent economic loss), as well as workplace transmission only comprising a fraction of that.
“And it doesn’t stop sickness”
Of course it doesn’t. Much of sick time isn’t used for communicable health issues and people tend to contract communicable diseases elsewhere anyway.
“Call it paid time off or holiday”
You literally have no idea what this discussion is about. You whined about carrying over sick days and how it “doesn’t make sense” (because you’re an idiot), and I pointed out that fiscally sick time is identical to vacation time, so if it’s okay to carry over vacation time then why is it not permissible for sick time?
“Don’t pretend that this is a better system”
A better system than what? Fixed amount of sick time each year? Because that’s the point of comparison. I can’t compare it to whatever you are advocating for because you flat out refuse to say it. (Again I strongly suspect you want indefinite sick time, but despite having multiple opportunities to elaborate you have failed to do so).
“By having a fixed account … {bunch of irrelevant nonsense}”
You realise the distinction you need to make is not in fixed days, compared to zero days. But fixed days compared to carried over days. If you are going to try to make a fiscal argument (again) actually try to understand what you are talking about.
Edit: You did misuse “liability”, or are at least fiscally inept. You claimed that carrying over sick time was somehow reducing liability, so either you have no idea what that word means or you don’t know how basic finance works. (It actually increases financial costs because you often have to pay out sick time at a higher rate if the employee pay increases.)
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workers rights improved when workers stopped doing their job and started wrecking shit, not by accepting garbage like this because its ‘not as bad as the other guy’
Sure it’s less bad, but it’s still pretty dismal.
Then again it’s also mind boggling that you guys can’t get medical care for serious issues without the risk of bankruptcy, or that your employers hold the keys to whether or not you can afford to get medical care.
I left reddit partly cuz of this tone, and im feeling that lemmy will be better if i cannot hear folks like you. Consider working on a less adversarial tone in future comments unless you’re an argument junkie
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A good start, but five days is still a laughable amount. That’s literally one illness, one time being sick.
Good thing there’s only one flu season … oh wait.
Hooray! America is saved!
Not even enough to cover one covid infection (and you can get infected once a month)
Well, a lot of companies use the official CDC recommendation of isolating for five days after a positive test. I know mine does.
Damn. How many strains are out there?
