Chances are they were being reimbursed by the Federal Govt for that time, I know our company had this available. That ended in November I think?
Poll: Is it a "slap in the face" to make nurses use PTO if they're out with COVID?
- Thread starter The Tradition
- Start date
Are they tested regularly by their employers? Healthcare workers are frequently exposed at work and subjected to mandatory testing by their employers as a result. Many many people in other fields sneak through with undetected asymptomatic cases and suffer less financial and social disruption. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, it just sucks, hence the idea of a “slap in the face”—which I maintain is an expression more about the subjective perception of an event rather than the objective judgment of just vs unjust.
Exactly. My company actually gave us an additional 80 hours on top of our PTO. Those 80 hours were set aside in order to care for myself or any dependent I was responsible for, if they became positive. I thought that was fair as I didn't think using PTO for 10 days for things like COVID, especially if I wasn't sick.
At present, we don't have PTO anymore. It's a "take it as you need it" strategy. Whether that is better than actually defined hours is another debate at another time. The point is that my company saw the possibility of people needing time off and set something up as to not burden the employee in that moment.
All of that said, I did have to quarantine early last year with my kids. I work in IT so "work from home" has been in place for the last 15 years. I ended up working through my quarantine and didn't take any of the extra time I was granted.
PTO is a shit system. Complete shit system. Never used to be such a thing as PTO. Sick and Vaca were separate. Nurses need to unionize across the country and hold the overpaid administrators hostage. Its one group of people that could literally bring our country to its knees. They have so much power, they need to use it.
Pretty soon you will be out of nursing staff and wiping old people's asses yourself.
They do?
My memory was PTO was a catch-all. Where I worked, “old sick time” was held separately and used first… before PTO bank was used. But that was 7-7 years ago. But what I am familiar with now is many companies give each FT employee 3 sick days annually and when they are used,the PTO bank is opened and used as “sick days.”
We used to have separate banks for sick and vacation but we got sick and tired of employees trying to use sick time for reasons not related to illness so they could save their vacation time.
This is definitely the issue with it and PTO does eliminate that. The problem is, when they switched from two separate banks to PTO, many (most?) places ended up cutting time off altogether because the PTO time didn't add up to the same amount of vacation and sick time.
To answer the OP, it depends on if they are vaccinated or not.
We use short term disability when people go out with COVID, unpaid leave when they have to isolate for exposure. Vaccinated people do not have to isolate, only wear mask for 10 days.
One of the things I suggested in Spring of 2020 was the federal government stepping in and offering paid time off for employees who were sick, as a way to encourage people to stay home if they weren’t feeling well without exceeding their PTO and without making employers bear the significant cost.
Instead we got crews sanitizing beach chairs…
Instead we got crews sanitizing beach chairs…
