Posted on 03/03/2010 9:46:19 AM PST by tje
Amid a crippling state fiscal crisis, managers throughout California's government have routinely allowed their employees to amass vast amounts of unused vacation time, enabling hundreds of workers to end their public-service careers with payouts topping $100,000, a California Watch investigation has found.
One worker combined vacation and compensatory time to walk away with more than $800,000, records show.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Calibrankuptia indeed.
When I look up California in the dictionary I read that it means it is a word on how public union employees rip off taxpayers (and laugh about it).
That’s why a lot of companies have use it or lose it policies. Especially if they’re trying to get bought, unused vacation can stack up to a scary looking liability on the books.
Not trying to sound like a broken record, but that is a union thing. In most private businesses I’ve worked in, you could not carry over more than a week of vacation and the amount of sick time could only accumulate to the point where you would pick up short term disability—and you could not cash in sick time. You could use it, but not walk away with six months of pay.
This way our liabilities would minimized, yet our employees would have their promised time off.
Anyway, we used to force people to take vacation. Due to some regulations, we actually forced some people to take two week, consecutive vacations for auditing purposes.
Easy solution: “Use it or lose it” policy.
This needs to change. Most companies will only allow the accumulation of about 80 hours of vacation time. The states should do the same thing and the problem goes away.
Private sector usually only allows a limited amount of carry-over from year to year. I’ve never worked at a job that allowed you to accumulate more than a few weeks a year to carry over. If you take a lot of time off by calling in sick for example, in the private sector you would limit yourself in terms of promotions. In the public/union sector its the opposite.
All animals are equal government animals are more equal than others.
Absolutely insane.
They need to adopt laws similar to private business.
Unused vacation time is bought back for $15.00 where I work. Not many people let it build up. I’m saving some to use my last year in 2012.
Maybe they’ll get an IOU.
The article does state that they do have limits on how much time can be carried over. How it was circumvented, doesn’t seem to be clear.
In the case of the person clearing over $800k, that was not vacation, but comp time as overtime wasn’t allowed.
I’m in no way defending this, just putting in some clarification.
Due to the rules against this, citizens might want to see what legal recourse they have to recoup this.
In the private sector, my understanding is, that as vacation is accrued, the company must actually bank that amount of money to cover it. Hence, companies will do a manadatory vacation in a quarter to make their books look good. As payroll comes out of the bank for that period, not out of the net.
Typing fast, gotta run.
I’m too lazy to pick up a calculator to figure out if the guy that got 800,000 was either making lots of money, worked a really long time, or both. Sounds like bs.
They’ve done that to us in the military for years. If you have to go over the approved leave balance, due to a deployment or unexpected situation, you have to get a waiver...signed by your CO and use it by next fiscal year.
100k, 800k !!
How is the world do you rack up that much unused vacation? That’s absolutely impossible in the private sector unless you are a very highly paid member of management.
So where are those that want to argue the Public vs. Private sector compensation being equal? Yea right!
This is why we must stop the expansion of government and begin ending public sector jobs by the metric ton. These people need to get real jobs that produce something not just steal from taxpayer/producers.
It’s getting really hard to have respect for people that work in the public sector. The more we know about thier compensation the more they are looking like parasites.
California labor law allows for this vacation accrual. When I worked in California, my employer had two vacation policies: One for California & another for the rest of the United States.
Anybody who doesn't see it is blind.
Gee, in the rest of the country you are only able to accumulate one week of unused vacation and the rest you lose. As to “unpaid comp time”.....what is that? (yes I know what it is, it’s just most of us never get anything like that)
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