What are Disadvantages to paid sick time?

Question

what are some disadvantages of employees having paid sick time?

We need cons for paid sick time for hourly employees.

Answer 1

What will end up happening is that they will be used when not sick for the most part. Have two options for you. Offer one personal holiday to be used as needed. Or have them bank time. Instead of receiving OT, let them bank the time for sick days, with a limit of x amount of days able to be earned, and banked. That way they have sick days, but had to earn them. No loss to the company, no loss to the employees

Answer 2

In California, sick days are not treated as a vested benefit but vacation days are. Basically that means that employees can lose sick days but not vacation days once they are earned. Because of this, many employees fake getting sick at the end of the year to use their sick days.

Having separate sick days versus Paid Time Off (PTO) means a duplicate system for accounting them along with vacation days. That is more hassle for your payroll or HR people and more hassle for your employees.

Some accounting practices count unused sick time as a liability.

Still, you need something to encourage your employees to stay home when they are truly sick so they don't spread infectious diseases in the workplace and cause more people to miss work.

Answer 3

The big disadvantage is when the sick time runs out and you get sick again. You are left with only two options: go to work and get everyone else sick. Or stay home without pay and risk losing your job.

If you're a fairly healthy person, this shouldn't matter. My company offers long term sick on top of our PTO. This means if I miss more than three days of work due to an illness, I can have it taken out of my long term sick and not my PTO.

Answer 4

Not sure what you are looking for, but if you are given sick days, employees might take off even when they're not really sick. This is particularly true if the sick days aren't allowed to be carried over.

Of course, there's the employer's cost.

Answer 5

you have to be sick to use it? ... The problem with sick time, at least with my former employer, is that it accumulated but got lost if I didn't use it. When I got laid off, it didn't get paid out to me, like my vacation time. I'd suggest trying to be creative with the use of accumulated sick time, such as, is it OK to use for a personal day off (like, you know, mentally sick)