Weekly/biweekly Michigan legislative action thread
Posted on 01/20/2013 5:55:20 AM PST by Kaslin
Many school districts allow employees to accrue unused sick days without limit and cash them out upon retirement.
In the Detroit district, for example, such a policy cost the district $12.5 million in unused sick leave in 2010-11.
It’s a major problem, but too many school districts are only taking baby steps to correct it.
In the small Holton, Michigan district, support personnel earn one sick day for each month worked. They’ve been allowed to accrue unused sick days without limit and cash them out upon retirement, or take extended leaves for any reason.
But now school officials are patting themselves on the back because they’ve capped the amount of unused sick days to be accrued at 120.
Superintendent Jason Kennedy wrote in a memo that “Sick days can be carried forward from year to year, and that led to employees being able to take ‘extended sick leave during any given year,’” the Muskegon Chronicle reported.
“(A) maximum cap limitation of 120 sick leave days has been added to prevent the over accumulation of sick days so that employees are not able to take multiple months of work in a row off beyond the 120 days,” he wrote.
Most school districts have about 180 days in an academic year. Even with the new cap, Holton school employees could potentially still take two-thirds of a school year off. That’s supposed to be a victory for the district and students?
But hey, this is what collective bargaining looks like.
It's all a huge scam...a mutually parasitic arrangement between Rat politicians and the fat a$$ed "workers".
These types of policies are not present, widely, in the private sector - for a reason. PTO, when used in place of scheduled work time does not cost money beyond the employee’s salary - it merely exchanges accounting classifications for the business. At the end of the year, the business has not paid out more than the employee’s salary, even though the employee may have used 3 sick days and 5 to 10 days of vacation.
To allow PTO to be accrues and cashed out costs a huge amount of money, that otherwise was not allocated for compensation. To view sick days and vacation time as separate from salary is wrong. It is time for the use it or lose it, on an annual basis, policies that we use in the private sector.
The natural common-sense limit for sick day retention is just below the number of days that disability kicks in.
Anyways, this 120 day thing is pure union cronyism, and would never see the light in the private sector. The purpose is to cover someone’s cold, the flu, or some day surgery. A cap of two weeks tops seems reasonable, with an expectation to lose it if healthy. The union mentality of course is to see it and use it EXACTLY like vacation time.
Socialism Is Legal Plunder - Bastiat
Schooled in socialism, it all adds up...
Soon health care will have all the compassion and efficiency and “one size fits all” philosophy of government schooling. Get the coffins ready!
You can kinda figure this out. If a guy gets 14 work-days a year for sick-leave, and generally only uses four days, then he’s got ten days a year for the next thirty-five years building up on a state program. The state might be stupid enough to have a door open and just agree to pay the guy for the whole 350 days, which opens up a hornets nest for your pension planning strategy. That’s way over a year’s pay that you give a guy for not being sick.
I do agree...being reasonable about it...it ought to cap off at roughly 60 days, and never go beyond that point.
Detroit.... SHOCKER! /sarc
I disagree with capping sick days, because the alternative, of employees periodically taking “sick day holidays”, just to use up their sick days, is just as expensive, and undermines their honesty.
And of course, the idea that someone might be sick or have an accident lasting more than a week at a time over the course of years, and be at threat for losing their job, should be considered.
Finally, workers sign contracts in which their employer voluntarily offers sick days as a perquisite to their job. To strip them of what they earned, voluntarily, by not being sick, is like saying, “Well, we promised you a wage, or salary, but it is now costing us too much, so we want say, $2,000 back. We’re retroactively capping your pay.”
What comes to mind is that sick days are actually a big incentive for a school district in contract negotiations, so if they put a sick day cap in the contract, there is a good chance that teachers will “shop” what district they want to work in, and go for the better offer. (Which happens right now).
I think the whole idea of sick days distinguished from vacation or leave days has passed by. I favor the PTO concept. In my view, there should be a limit of how many days should be allowed to accrue to be paid out at the end of one’s service or contract. Lastly, PTO beyond a set number of days, say 3, needs to be pre approved or else becomes unpaid. If the PTO is for sickness, same applies, after three days one needs a medical note or approval.
Sorry if that does not fit someone’s idea that a job is secondary or terciary in one’s life plan but it is impossible to manage a business wherein employees come and go at their whim...even if they work for the government. Yes, one earns their PTO but with that does not come the right to use it whenever they wish regardless of the impact on their employer and coworkers. All IMO of course.
My wife has taught 25 years. Several years back she had a serious operation, used 4 months worth of sick days hospitalized and in recovery; was glad that she had saved all those days rather than using several days every year. Honestly, that's how most teachers use their sick days.
Most teachers out there are not all that happy with the NEA either; they want a union more responsive to education than politics. If a teacher attempts to quit the NEA, they are quickly blackballed and fired; and it has always been that way. Most teachers view their $100/month union dues as the price of their occupation and ignore all the left wing politics of the NEA.
I don’t think we disagree on any of your points. I don’t see how my “plan” does either.
I have no love of unions, but this is a silly non-issue. It is clearly stated that the employees earn 1 day of sick leave for each month worked. That’s 12 days added to their sick leave bank each year, assuming they don’t use any of it throughout the year. The only way they could take off 120 days would be if they banked their entire annual sick leave accrual for 10 full years!
At the time when I worked at Lockheed Martin until Jan 2008, we had a very generous carryover vacation policy. At the time, at the end of the year, whatever hours you had over 400 hours was paid to you and your vacation time was truncated down to 400. At the time I got laid off, they got rid of that policy and implemented a step down policy. In 2008, you could have a max of 560 hours but once you hit the max, you didn’t get anymore vacation hours. They also took 40 hours away each year from the max to where in 2012, the max you can have is 400 hours. It was suppose to stop there but from what I heard from several people, they are continue to step down and this year, you can have 360 hours max.
I still keep in touch with quite a few LM folks and from what they mentioned, they are getting squeezed and fearful of their jobs, taking vacation is more difficult now especailly with the amount of work expected and they are hitting the max, therefore indirectly losing time. The division that I worked for had an unwritten policy that you were expected to give free time to the company back for the vacation pay. This is on top of the expected 5 hours of free time per week you were expected to give each week. Work 45 but get paid for 40. This division is under Linda Gooden. Furthermore, managers have been told as a part of their performance assessment that they are required to get 100 hours of free time from each direct report employee and also discourage employees from taking more than a week off at a time for vacation. Top performing employees are given more flexibility to take time off like take 2 weeks at once and those employees who are considered sub-par are discouraged from even taking a week off and directed to take a day or two here and there.
I do remember one manager I worked for at LM, liberal democrat of course called me into his office and I got chewed out for wanting to take two weeks off in July and I was literally screamed at. He told me that vacation was one benefit that required management approval before being taken and when and how I got to take vacation was considered a privilege. He also required contact information before leaving and added the caveat that I could be recalled at anytime during vacation. Right after my @$$ chewing, a week later, he took vacation to Cape Cod for two weeks.
One company I worked for in Indiana had a very stingy vacation policy. You had to wait a minimum of 1 year before even taking vacation and then the next 3 years, you only got 1 week’s vacation. On your 5th year, you got 2 weeks. Vacation time was not allowed to be carried over and due to the company’s setting up of the fiscal year where the new year started on July 1, they very much frowned on taking time off during the Summer and the accounting department, it was forbidden to take time off during June, July and August. We also had the day of and day before Christmas and New Year’s Day. We were forbidden from taking time off between Christmas and New Year’s as well. You were also forbidden from taking off more than a week at a time for vacation.
> These types of policies are not present, widely, in the private sector -
> It is time for the use it or lose it, on an annual basis, policies that we use in the private sector.
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This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
It's what "collective bargaining" looks like when politicians "negotiate" with other people's money.
For decades the politicians have met in smoke-filled back rooms with union pinky rings and, with a wink and a nod, offered to give the rank-and-file lavish pension plans and lifetime retirement bennies IN LIEU OF big pay raises that would have to be paid for out of CURRENT budgets, and that might require tax hikes. But, see, lavish pension plans and lifetime retirement bennies, well... they get paid for out of FUTURE budgets - - decades in the future.
That is, the politicians buy their votes today with the taxpayer money of tomorrow. They just kick the can down the road and let future politicians and future taxpayers deal with the inevitable financial calamity that comes to bear in 20 or 30 years. "That'll be their problem, (shrug)", has been the unspoken understanding of the slimy politicians and their pinky ring union collaborators. Meanwhile, current taxpayers can shrug because, hey... their taxes didn't go up this year.
This is this kind of corrupt "negotiating" that politicians can get away with because, unlike in the private sector, they get to "negotiate" with other people's money. There is no "bottom line" or "profit and loss" statement, and no annual report to stockholders to worry about. No, when politicians "negotiate" with government employee unions, it's like the foxes negotiating with the coyotes over how to divide up the chickens in the hen house.
Anyway, in many states and cities, 20 or 30 years have come and gone. Now what?
Thank God for Scott Walker and a few other governors who have had the guts to put their foot on the can and kick it right back where it came from.
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