Sick leave policies and issues

dusty moshier · May 2003

Just suppose you know someone with a sick leave policy adopted back in 1974 that reads something like: "Each employee will receive 1 1/2 days a month for sick leave. The sick leave time is cumulative from year to year."
This is a very employee friendly employer and its employees like it there alot, so many have stayed with the company for a long time. As you can imagine, since they are loyal employees, they show up for work everyday and are rarely sick. There are several of these long time employees, but one, for example, has accumulated 2,916 hours of sick leave, or basically a year of potential time off.
This company wants to change the policy, but the issue is what can or must be done with the accumulated sick leave? This is a Kansas employer and Kansas has a Wage Payment Act that does not like forfeiture of accrued benefits.
The other issue is, how to word the new polciy to take into consideration those accumulated hours (perhaps options to cash them in at a discounted rate or to leave it alone and take the position that sick leave is available while you are an employee and you have no right to payment for it if and when you leave the company, which is pretty much what everyone believes is the policy)? I hope you can suggest other options.
Help! Dusty

Hunter1 · May 2003

We had a labor agreement when I came to my present employer (years ago) which allowed unlimited sick leave accrual and pay-out at final rate when an employee retired! One of the first things I did was to negotiate the pay-out out of the agreement, but I agreed to value the accrued sick leave at that time at rates effective at that time. We now only have a couple of those employees left, and a payout of a few thousand dollars looks pretty small compared to amounts as high as $70,000+ which would otherwise be available to all employees.

Don D · May 2003

Dusty: Reminds me of the Andy Griffith show where the town council is going to kick the old guy out of his house just to improve the unsightly mess at the end of Main Street. Andy is helping the old guy go through his stuff and finds a war bond over a hundred years old that has compounded interest. The town council is notified that the town owes the old guy hundreds of thousands of dollars, so they back off the eviction. (Eventually they discover it's a Confederate war bond and worthless, but the message is the same as yours).

Looks to me like in your situation, somebody is required to cough up some cash.

Rockie · May 2003

I was in this situation once and we cashed out the sick leave over a three year period in three equal installments. I don't know if your state law would allow you to cash in "2 for 1" or something like that. I know that our state government is the only organization I know that lets employee accrue unlimited sick time. The employees can use it towards retirement time.

Moria · May 2003

When we converted from a vacation/sick time accrual package to a Paid Time Off (PTO) benefit we "banked" a majority of the employees sick time hours. First, we never had a policy that "sick" time was a "paid" benefit, or in other words if they were terminated that they would receive their sick time as a paid benefit. We didn’t however want them to feel that we were taking away a benefit, especially those employees who had been with us for several years.

In the "sick bank" policy, we stated that during an extended illness they would have to take 5 days of their PTO before they would be able to use their banked sick time. We also used the criteria for FMLA to establish a long term illness.

Hope this helps.

scottorr · May 2003

I have worked in an environment that allowed employees to accrue sick time. They then allowed employees to use that time toward retirement so if an employee had accrued 5 years worth of sick time, they could retire at age 60 and continue to get paid until age 65. Very liberal benefits. I think if you make any changes you may want to consider grandfathering the old policy of accruals. For example, the employee that accrued 2916 hours of sick, could keep what they had accrued at the time of the change in policy. After the policy they would only accrue at the rate that the new policy states. Just a thought!

Sick leave policies and issues

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