Which goes right back to the often repeated point: What is legitimate sick time? How do you qualify that, when it is entirely up to the employee to determine when to use sick days? I have never heard of any organization, that expects employees to not use all of their paid sick days each year, unless they allow them to be carried over from year to year. How oblivious to the world around you and human nature do you have to be, to not realize what would happen in this situation? Is there some universal prescription everyone is on that kept them from seeing this coming? Allow people to save their days from year to year, with (apparently) no limit on how many days they can save, and then tell them, you can't save those days anymore, and if you don't use the ones you have saved, they are going to disappear, and expect them to not take those days? And then everyone wants to blame them for doing what almost everyone would do, in the same situation.
Paid sick time is a benefit. If it is allowed to be banked, then it is a deferred benefit. A simple example, teacher works for 10 years, takes minimal sick days and has 60 days banked, plus the current years allotment. Teacher suffers a serious illness, and has to miss 2 months of school, they're covered, by their benefit. Take away all those banked sick days and what happens in the same situation? Very quickly the teacher uses up their sick days, and is no longer getting paid. Those days have a specific dollar value. Taking those days away is taking away money from the teachers. It really is as simple as that. For some teachers, I imagine the amount could be a significant amount of money. Naturally, they are going to take some of those days before they lose them. The entire issue would have been avoided if everyone hadn't been blind to the obvious outcome. A very simple, cheaper solution that would have avoided the problem would have been to give an option of selling those banked days back, at a discount, maybe pay 6 days for every 10 due. But no one had the foresight to see this coming, so now everyone is complaining about it.
