One Quarter of Americans Don't Get Paid Days Off

[FreeJoe]

37. That is unusual

Ours used to be based on time with the company. Then it was time in the industry. Now it is just age based. I'm in the oldest group, so I get 7 weeks. We also get 11 holidays, but none of them are floating. We can also work either a normal eight hour day schedule (with flex time) or we can work nine our days M-Th and then eight hours one Friday with the opposite Friday off.

When I originally started working professionally eons ago, I was at IBM. I can't recall how much vacation I had, but we had unlimited sick time. In fact, you could call in sick while on vacation and it wouldn't count against your vacation. It worked really well.

Later, when I spent time outside of the IBM bubble, I saw how differently people used sick time. Some people were legitimately sick a lot. Others were never sick. Some people used sick days when they were physically fine but "sick of work". I got kind of disillusioned about it. Now I kind of like just having one big pot of "paid time off." If I don't feel well enough (physically or mentally), I don't go to work. I don't have to fret over whether I'm really sick enough to justify a sick day. In fact, last week I felt like I was getting sick so I took a PTO day and stayed home.