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Negative-leave policies at some workplaces can put additional burdens on workers and even endanger public health.
Maria Ammerman has three children, so when the coronavirus pandemic hit, she wanted to be smart. Ammerman works for Hennepin County, Minnesota, in Aging and Disabilities Services. She has been there for over nine years, and since mid-March she has been doing her job from home—a hard task with a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old, and a 16-year-old in the house too.
Like many workers around the country, Ammerman’s paid time off (PTO) is bundled together for vacations and sick days, and she mostly relies on it for when she needs to take time off to take care of one of her children if they get ill. “I’ve had a lot of emergencies with my kids,” she explains. “I really bank on that sick and leave time and vacation time. I don’t use that to go on vacation or anything like that.”
Trying to plan for worst-case scenarios like catching the virus, Ammerman started to look into an additional possibility: negative PTO. When the Hennepin County Board declared a coronavirus emergency, it expanded the possibility for workers to take more paid time off than they’ve accrued, and then work it back off through something that many people refer to as “PTO debt.” It’s a policy that is spreading in both the public and the private sector, touted by its proponents as a way to help people through an unexpected crisis, in a country that provides little support for working people with any sort of health care needs. But its critics liken it to indentured servitude.
The promise of additional PTO was alluring, but the prospect of debt left Ammerman leery, and the process of trying to find out details of how it would work was frustrating. “I felt like one of our clients, getting shuffled through the system,” she says. The emergency declaration meant she could use up to 240 hours of additional PTO after exhausting what she’d accrued; that would be paid back, as long as she stayed at the company, with 25 percent of each bit of time she accrued after that. She’d have to sign a form (shared with the Prospect by Ammerman’s union) stating, “If I leave Hennepin County employment for any reason before repaying the advanced sick leave/PTO, I must reimburse the county the amount of money equal to the unrestored leave hours, except in the case of full disability or death. If such a situation occurs, I authorize the county to deduct from my final paycheck(s) the balance of advanced sick leave/PTO I still owe.”
Negative-leave policy places additional burdens on workers, says Remy Huerta-Stemper, chief steward at AFSCME Local 34, which represents 2,400 public workers in Minnesota, including Maria Ammerman. “We have members with ongoing health concerns who have no leave, and now will owe a debt to their employer,” Huerta-Stemper says. “When it comes to member health, safety, child care, or schooling, the combination of conflicting federal and county leaves makes our members vulnerable to capricious interpretations of new policy. The situation is untenable and nobody knows what it will look like to repay this debt. It will not be easy.”
If Ammerman remains an “employee in good standing” with the county after a year, she can get 40 hours of that negative balance forgiven. But her rate of accruing leave is meager. “Let’s say I do use 40 hours,” she explains. “Next year, I’m going to pay back up to 52 before I will ever be reimbursed. I almost have to use a ton of it to maybe get some of it back.” As for “in good standing,” she wonders what that means—and what happens if layoffs come?
Ammerman is relatively lucky, of course, that so far her need to use the extra time remains just a worst-case scenario. She works from home, so her likelihood of catching the virus isn’t as high as for some of the other members of her union, which also represents health care workers. But for her and other workers, the possibility of being in debt to employers for getting ill during a global pandemic isn’t very appealing.
The pandemic is revealing all sorts of holes in the meager American social safety net, but the lack of guaranteed paid sick time is perhaps the most obvious one.
Workers in a broad spectrum of industries, from retail to health care to progressive nonprofits, told the Prospect stories of their negative PTO experiences. Ryan (who asked not to reveal his last name nor the name of his employer) works in the mortgage industry in Pennsylvania and got sick last winter. “I was required to use all of my PTO before I could use the short-term disability insurance,” he explains in an email. “Our employer had, at that time, a policy of allowing us to go into PTO debt as needed, so I was forced to use it all.” Unlike the Minnesota workers, his accrual was added directly to his debt each week until he finally made it back to zero. “It wasn’t fun, because even upon my return to work I had many doctor visits and medical treatments that I had to juggle in an office schedule with no ability to take paid time off. If I had left the job, voluntarily or involuntarily, that PTO debt would have been taken out of my last check. I had no intention of leaving, but it definitely felt like its own form of job lock.”
The University of Oregon’s collective-bargaining agreement with faculty includes “advanced” sick leave (PTO debt) as part of its “paid” parental leave policy, meaning that a worker with a new baby will end up owing time that they take off to spend with the child.
Morgan (who also asked to be referred to only by that name) worked for a nonprofit doing mental-health services for youth and families involved with the child welfare system. “In 2016, I needed to have an emergency tonsillectomy. I had 2 days of PTO available to use, but I had to be off of work for 10 days to recover,” Morgan explains by email. “The company told me that they would front the 8 days of PTO and that I would have to work off that time.” That meant that every hour of PTO accrued would be “absorbed” to cover the full 8 days they had taken off. “I was told that if I needed to take any time off before then, it would be unpaid, and that the remaining amount would be taken out of my last paycheck if I resigned before it was fulfilled. I would also have to pay any extra remaining amount out-of-pocket if it totaled more than my last paycheck.” In that case, Morgan would have been literally paying the company to work.
The pandemic, of course, is revealing all sorts of holes in the meager American social safety net, but the lack of guaranteed paid sick time is perhaps the most obvious one. In a pandemic, where public health demands people stay home, but the federal government has balked at providing sufficient funding to pay people to do that, a lot of workers might be making the choice to work with symptoms—particularly when testing remains hard to come by. In this climate, paid sick time is newly urgent, and we need to be incentivizing workers to take it as soon as they notice symptoms, not to work while sick because they’re in “debt” to the company.
It’s been about a decade since the movement to enact paid sick time really took off, according to Sherry Leiwant, the co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, an organization that advocates for policies that allow working people to better meet caregiving responsibilities. “We really didn’t think we could pass laws requiring vacation time,” she notes, but at the same time companies were moving from separate vacation time and sick time to the combination known as PTO. “The initial feeling was that companies—especially large companies—were doing that, in part, to reduce what they had to give people,” Leiwant says. “They put everything together, but the accumulated time was less.”
Younger, healthier workers might have appreciated the ability to take more vacation time, Leiwant notes. But those who had their own health problems or, like Maria Ammerman, others to care for wound up losing their vacation time to more practical concerns. Some states, like Maine and Nevada, have actually taken their cue from employers, Leiwant says, and enacted PTO laws rather than sick-time laws. “The big problem that we see with that is that there are these absence-control policies where if you don’t give notice about taking your leave then you will get demerits and that can be true even if you’re sick.”
Advocates settled on accrued sick leave because they thought it would be an easier sell to lawmakers if they argued that workers were “earning” it.
Allowing some negative leave didn’t strike Leiwant as a totally off-base policy, as many states and companies have a waiting period before employees can access some sort of accrued time off. But the idea that employees would have to pay it back out of their checks, she says, “seems really wrong.” The current crisis, she notes, did spark lawmakers to enact the Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act and Emergency Family and Medical Leave Expansion Act, both parts of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA). These time-limited expansions require “certain employers” to provide up to 80 hours of paid sick leave, as well as expanded family leave—the first time that the federal government had made any such mandate. Under this provision, Leiwant says, people should just be able to take the sick leave, without having to accrue it as debt. But the narrow eligibility requirements, which exempt both very large and very small companies, potentially leave out millions of workers. And if companies are laying people off who might have PTO debt, “your employer is going to try to get money out of you because you took some time before you went on unemployment?” Leiwant asks. “That is just wrong. At this particular time, that should not be happening.”
The crisis is proving that waiting periods for leave are a bad idea—a gap that allows things like “negative leave” to appear. Advocates settled on accrued sick leave, Leiwant says, because they thought it would be an easier sell to lawmakers if they argued that workers were “earning” it. State and municipal laws have relatively short waiting periods, but some employers make workers wait as much as a year before they can use leave—in that case, she says, “if you end up sick or needing to take time off, you’re obviously going to have to borrow against it, whether you get in a lump sum in a year or you accrue it while you are working.”
The push to reopen before the virus is tamed makes these questions that much more urgent. With health care workers among those accruing PTO debt, the system is creating more incentives for workers to show up while sick, especially as the pandemic drags on. “We’ve focused a lot on the unemployment insurance, which is really important as things are closed and people are out of work, but if things start to reopen when we know we have not licked this thing there are definitely going to be people who are going to be sick and they are definitely going to need paid time off,” Leiwant says. “When this pandemic started, there were 35 million workers who had no paid sick time. People are coming to understand that this is really something that everybody needs, not just because it’s the right thing for workers but just for the public health, as well.”
