Examples of companies offering sick leave donation programs?
My company just recently started a PTO (paid time off) donation program. We don’t have different types of leave for sick or vacation time – any time off falls under PTO. The donor must have a minimum PTO balance of 27 hours (three days) left after the donation. The value of the donation is calculated by multiplying the donor’s rate of pay times the number of PTO hours donated. The dollar value is then divided by the recipient’s pay rate to determine how many PTO hours are credited to the recipient. The donors remain anonymous, but the time does go to the specific employee who’s experiencing the illness (or who is caring for a sick family member), not to a general time bank. I really think it’s a great program, and having recently benefited from it, I’m thankful to have had it.
I work for Accenture, a huge global consulting firm, and my company allows “eligible employees to donate and/or receive donations of accrued paid time off for critical personal situations and family medical emergencies.” You can find out more about our general PTO structure here, but unfortunately it doesn’t mention the donation option. I do have an intranet site that tells me a good deal more about the internal process for donations, but I’m not going to copy paste that info here. Email me (in profile) if you’d like to get more details on the process. I know they used this as a selling point when recruiting me so I don’t exactly consider it proprietary info that I can’t give you a little insight on.
I work for a school board, our union has a “sick bank”. you must donate a day to join with a balance of 20 day left for your personal use. Occasionally the Sick Bank will ask for one day donation, this has happened 3 times in the last four years. If you choose not to donate at that time, you will be dropped from the bank. In order to use any days from the bank, you must first deplete fully your own personal sick days. Then you petition the board in writing, asking for additional days. I had surgery and was out of work for nine weeks, I had 30 days of sick pay and the bank kicked in 15 days. It would have been very hard if I had to go without pay for 3 weeks.
That sounds like a really cool project that I would love my company (a non-profit) to take part in! When I worked in England, my company there had a similar system where people could either give off their sick days or buy extra vacation time at a small premium from the company to a limit of an extra two weeks each year. But, that said, the company made people take the time they bought and people could not transfer vacation time off.
