Change in status and accrued sick leave
Shackney
3 Posts
Hello,
I have a question about sick leave policies. I have an employee that was an exempt employee who had a total of 120 sick hours accrued when he determined that he wanted to move to a part time status. He is now an hourly part time employee and is asking about his sick leave balance. Our policy is that part tiem employees do not get any benefits so his accruals stopped for both sick and vacation. He is of course able to use his vacation balance of accrued hours but it never occured to me that he might be eligible for his sick hours becuase when an employee leaves the company we pay out vacation but not sick but since he is not termed and is still an employee with a different status is he still entitled to use the sick time if he gets sick? We don't have a policy that addresses this situation and I have never come across this set of circumstances before. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. We are a virtual company with employees in 40 states, this employees lives in the state of Florida.
Thanks,
Comments
It is generally a good strategy to guess in favor of the employee if you have no other information.
In part, it depends on what your policy says, which should reflect how aggressive your state is about employee concerns (versus employer concerns). When a person terms, they lose their accrued sick time. This employee is not termed. It sounds like your policy is silent. So, assuming that sick time is something you can simply axe off of a current employee due to a change in status, consider this:
If you were free to do whatever you wanted, what would you do? What message would that promote to employees? Is that the right message?
On the other hand, the fact that the employee has not termed has put the status of that sick leave in limbo. It's not clear that you can simply take it away once accrued without having a better understanding of (a) your state's public policies, statutes, and case law, and (b) your company's appetite for risk.