Saturday, June 20, 2009

Careless reporting

The Toronto Star governs itself by a set of values called the Atkinson Principles. The second Atkinson Principle is Social Justice, and the fourth Atkinson Principle is The Rights of Working People.

I think they came perilously close to violating those principles with a bit of irresponsible reporting about city employees' sick leave.

The situation is that city employees' sick leave is currently banked, and they get paid for sick leave that is left unused when they leave their employment with the city. In the current labour negotiations, the city wants to take this away and the union wants to keep it.

There really two separate questions here, the second conditional on the first:

1. Should sick leave be banked?
2. Should employees be paid for unused banked sick leave?

Banking sick leave is not uncommon, although far from universal. As I've blogged about before, of the people I know who have paid sick leave, nearly all of them have bankable sick leave. This is a good arrangement because, as many people are fond of pointing out, sick leave is for when you're sick, and most people don't get sick at the same rate every year. Most years you only need a couple of days (say half a day for your annual check-up and then one day off because your brains are draining out your sinuses), but one or twice in your life you need a whole lot of time off, say for chemotherapy or major surgery.

With bankable sick leave, there is no other provision for time off for major medical conditions that require extensive time off. The assumption is that you'll use your banked sick leave for this. You can probably convince your employer to give you unpaid time off for major illness (in the cases of the people I was able to ask while writing this blog entry, the unpaid time off is technically at the employer's sole discretion, but realistically you'll get it), but there is no separate paid long-term disability leave. For example, someone I know worked at her job for 20 years with barely a day off, then one day threw out her back and required several months off to recover. Because she had nearly 20 years of sick leave banked, she was able to take the time she needed to recover without loss of income, then returned to work bringing with her 20 years of corporate memory back with her.

Whether or not to pay employees for unused bank sick leave is a separate issue. Some of the situations I'm familiar with get paid out or are tacitly allowed to tack it on at the beginning of retirement, others don't get any compensation for it - it's just sitting there as a safety net. In any case, it is possible to bank sick leave with or without paying employees for unused leave. It can work both ways.

The problem with the Toronto Star article is that they're presenting it as a single yes/no issue. They're presenting the pay-out as an integral part of banked sick leave, implying that to get rid of the pay-out you have to get rid of banked sick leave. If you look at the poll, they present it as a yes/no question, with no room for opinions such as "Banking the sick days is perfectly reasonable, but the payout at the end is a bit excessive." And, if you look at the comments section (I know, I know) a lot of people seem to be reading it as a single inseparable black and white issue.

My concern is that this article, especially with its somewhat sensationalist presentation (it was the most prominent article on the Toronto Star homepage all of yesterday, with the cartoon the largest image on the page), will lead people to become outraged at the prospect of up to 130 days' pay-out (which, as we know, people will be inclined to read without the "up to") and, seeing the pay-out as inseparable from banked sick leave, then write their city councillors demanding that banked sick leave for city employees be eliminated. Then our city workers will be stuck with a less just sick leave system that does not respond nearly as well to real-life sick leave needs, and all because of some unnuanced reporting from our city's largest newspaper.

2 comments:

laura k said...

The Star is very good at that unnuanced reporting. They often border on tabloid.

I remember reading about bankable sick time on this blog with some amazement. In my field, it is common to be able to bank a certain amount of vacation time, but never sick time. It's always "use it or lose it" by December 31.

There is also short-term disability or medical leave, which requires all kinds of proof (which is fair, I think), but could take the place of all that banked sick time.

In general, the constant public attack on workers' gains and benefits is so appalling. Everyone seems so eager to see other people have less.

impudent strumpet said...

I think part of it is that the anti-banking people think we get disability or medical leave when necessary on top of the banked sick time, and the sick time is 18 (in the case of City workers) days a year for a runny nose. That's why I keep belabouring how it works. Hopefully people will pick up that it's not just for a cold, it's also for chemotherapy.

Now that I think about it, it's weird that vacation time is generally more bankable/pay-outable than sick time. Because vacation time you can totally plan for and use up on purpose - that's what it's for.

You could totally say to your boss or your team "I'm going to be taking a week off because I have some vacation time to use up." But you generally couldn't say "I'm not coming in tomorrow, I have some sick time to use up."