Gov. Chris Christie's campaign to halt the practice of accruing unused sick days for a big payout later rang a bell with Plaintalker.
For some time now, the state has required municipalities to declare in their annual budget documents how much money is owed to employees for unused sick and vacation days. As reporter before I retired in 2003, I was quite intrigued by this concept. The editors agreed to let me do a story on it, but as was the practice in those days, they wanted me to call every town in the entire readership territory and get comments. I got pretty far into gathering information from the 50 or so municipalities before the project was dropped in favor of something else.
But it still seemed like an issue that needed some light shed on it and in 2008 I finally did a blog post on it. Click here to read it.
If reforms are passed, the current liability would remain, but the practice would not be continued for workers from that point on.
Not all municipalities permit employees to carry over unused sick and vacation days, but the amount currently owed in Plainfield is staggering. A change is due.
--Bernice
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I hope our Democratic leaders get their act together and don't line their pockets with our money by ignoring this important legislation. No one in the real working world gets paid extra for being healthy. The voters need to get behind this.
ReplyDeleteAt my workplace we can accrue up to six weeks sick time which we must use before going out on either short or long term disability. Any sick hours on the books when we leave the company vanish.
ReplyDeleteVacation and personal hours do not carry over each year and are on a use it or lose it yearly basis. If one leaves mid-year with vacation time on the books, they do get paid for it. However, the maximum vacation time for the company is five weeks a year -- it goes by time served. So, the additional monies would at the most be five weeks, not decades of gathering hours!
Those policies are actually fairly generous in the private sector these days. Many companies are hiring part time with no benefits or not giving decent benefit packages.