Probably the water...pfft!
10 sick days and 18 “leave” days is about 6 weeks of workdays. Then you think about government employees frequently get MANY paid holidays, etc., they are not really at the job so much.
This is pretty different than private sector jobs.
10 sick days is not too extreme. People can, and do, get sick. It is better for everyone if sick folks do stay home and recover. Even private industry recognizes this simple fact and usually gives a sick leave benefit.
ALSO,
Michigan has cold weather and lots of O’s alien invaders are being dumped into MI to try to keep MI in the D voting column. Some of these ‘nice IslamoNazis’ and other foreigners bring in diseases, as can be expected. American citizens’ immunoresistence to such pathogens may be low or non-existent, due to the previous lack of exposure to same inside USA. Therefore, such diseases can spread rapidly to many American citizens.. and can be more serious, too, than they usually are in their Islamic and other countries of origin.
A woman gets pregnant and gets 6 weeks maternity leave (sick leave), that’s 30 days right there. At federal agencies, men are now taking paternity leave.
State employees accrue 4.0 hours of sick leave for every 80 hrs worked (IOW, part-timers would take perhaps four weeks to accumulate the 4.0 hours); there’s no cap (this is all “last I knew” info, btw), upon retirement 50% of the remaining hours are paid out at severance.
Vacation time (”annual leave”) is capped at 240 hours (six weeks) initially, climbing in five-year steps to a max of 316 (including a separate counter of 16 hours personal leave, awarded at hire, and once a year). All remaining vacation time is paid at severance, but only the first 240 hours are used to figure final compensation and retirement benefits under the old “defined benefit” plan.
Annual leave accrual rates go up over years of service; the rate is 4.0 per 80 hrs worked during the first six months (the probationary period) then rises to 4.7 (if the employee makes probation, and yes, it actually happens that some don’t). At 5 years it rises to 5.3 hrs, at 10 years 5.9, at 15 years to 6.5, at 20 to, hmm, I forget, although I think it’s 7.1... as the accrual rate rises, remaining under the 240 cap can become a problem, although in reality, that’s not a bad problem to have, and most state employees rarely (or even never) face it.
By the time the accrual rate maxes out (something like 10.x hrs per pay period, IOW, more than a day every two weeks) the once bright-eyed and bushy-tailed state employee in their 20s has grown decrepit in the daily grind of state service, and could be well into their early 50s.
Hey, I could go on about LTD insurance coverage rates and how they decline based on the number of hours of sick leave, but I won’t, and that’s a break for you (as Adlai Stevenson once said when part of a campaign speech blew away).
I worked for a software company that didn’t give a lot of sick time, only 40 hours for the first five years years then 80 hours after that.
There were some folks that made a point of not taking a sick day, ever, they came in with serious cases of flu, food poisoning, whatever. Some of them had 300 hours of sick leave built up. They were planning on getting paid for it when they quit.
Then the company announced everyone’s accumulated sick leave would be reduced to 40 hours at their next anniversary date and you could never carry over more than 40 hours from that point on. And that was that.
Employees were free to take their 300 hours (or whatever) within the next year, so there was no legal basis for saying anyone actually lost the hours, everyone got to use their hours they had built up.
The accountants had pointed out the large amount of sick time accumulated by certain employees were a liability on the spreadsheet, easily running into the six figures, so poof, one year they had them, the next year they were gone.
So take ‘em if you got ‘em folks, they might not be there tomorrow.
Mostly Mondays and Fridays, I’ll wager.
How many more state and federal holidays?
I had 2 people in my office (not gov’t) who for 11+ years would be absent 1 to 2 days each month. Rarely did they go a whole month without doing so. One got fired by a new manager and the other quit a year and half later.
They would also had 4 weeks of vacation plus the holidays but still were absent.