Agenda Packets - 2005/04/04 - Laserfiche WebLink

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3. As currently written, the proposed sick leave donation policy appears to allow an employee to use donated sick leave for care of their children, and other family members and for common illnesses and doctor’s visits. Most cities use sick leave donation only for catastrophic illnesses such as cancer and for disabling injuries and usually only for the employee’s own personal use. Consider an example where an employee goes to a psychiatrist complaining about depression due to disciplinary action taken against her by her supervisor and receives a doctor’s statement saying that she should be off for work for six weeks. If the policy denies use of sick leave donation for psychiatric reasons, the city may be subject to lawsuits. Consider a real life example from another city where an employee’s psychiatrist recommended a vacation due to depression related to a death in the family and the employee used donated sick leave for this purpose. Co-workers, upon learning of this use, were upset with the city because they felt they had been “duped” into donating sick leave. 4. The policy, as written, allows an employee to donate sick leave with only 40 hours remaining for him/herself. The city should consider a significantly higher limit; a bad bout with the flu could cause the donating employee to exhaust his/her own sick leave shortly after the donation takes place, then asking to recover the donated sick leave. 5. Someone in the city has to make the call on who can use the program and when it can be used. This puts the city administrator in the position of saying “yes” to Employee A and “no” to Employee B. In some cases, the employee who is denied may see this as discriminatory and file a grievance or lawsuit. 6. Since co-workers are the source of sick leave donations, what if employees decide to donate to a white, male co-worker and not to a female, African- American co-worker? This could generate lawsuits for the city as well. The city may want to consider implementing a short-term disability and long-term disability group plan at the employee’s own expense rather than a sick leave donation program. This would cause no extra expense (other than some administrative work) for the city and could meet the same needs for employees. I hope this information is helpful. If the city does decide to go forward with this policy, I would strongly suggest making it more restrictive and building in some protections to address the issues cited above. Staff believes that protections can be built into the policy to address these concerns. Staff believes that employees are probably aware of another employee abusing sick time than would his or her supervisor, and toward that end, someone who abuses their sick leave would get little sympathy from his or her coworkers. In addition, any abuse of sick leave policies is a disciplinary issue. The policy should only apply toward catastrophic illnesses or injuries for the employee, or would be used for taking care of an employee’s spouse, child, sister, brother, mother, father, mother-in-law, or father-in-law who has a serious health condition. Employees who would like to donate sick leave to another employee, must have at least 80 hours of banked sick time to ensure that the employee donating the sick time is not put in a position where he or she would need to borrow for their own benefit later on.