Cutting part time workers’ sick leave entitlements from the 10 days everyone currently gets to being pro-rated based on how much they work.
*** Also covid vaccines will apparently no longer be free for most people after this month.*** EDIT: this was circulating yesterday, but isn’t true so that’s good.
And this during the biggest covid wave in 18 months, where hospitals and schools are having to close or reduce capacity because so many staff are sick. What a bunch of ghouls.
The obvious solution that seems to be overlooked every time sick leave comes up, is to roll it up into ACC, and have sick leave paid out from there, instead of having employers fund it directly.
The sum of costs to employers and pay for employees would be unchanged, but it would eliminate the uncertainty on how many sick days your particular employees take, making life easier for businesses, and it would allow for sick leave to be taken right from day one in the job, making like easier for workers.
It’s quite an interesting idea actually, one issue I can think of is employers encouraging employees to pull a sickie, instead of taking leave, as sick days aren’t a cost to them.
That’s a possibility, but I think with some degree of oversight, and checking up on businesses with significantly above average leave rates, it could be avoided. A lower amount of leave taken is generally indicative of a healthier workplace, so perhaps there might be an incentive system where companies get reductions in their levies for low rates of sick leave… although that just turns the problem you described on it’s head…
How does it work when a business wants to provide more sick days or unlimited sick leave, as some do? Or would ACC have unlimited sick leave?
I think the reason we cap sick leave at the moment is because it is employer funded. It would be unreasonable to burden a business with paying for the long-term illness of someone just because they happened to be an employee when they got sick.
When ACC was first set up, the working group that put it together had actually recommended that non-inury sickness be covered as well, but it was not implemented because of the political situation of the time.
If we move the burden of supporting workers who become ill from individual employers, then I think it makes the argument for long-term or indefinite sick leave a lot more palatable.
When ACC was first set up, the working group that put it together had actually recommended that non-inury sickness be covered as well, but it was not implemented because of the political situation of the time.
Aaah that’s so interesting. Would have been a radically different system.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see a proposal for this. If you’re gonna do it, the first step might not be to push all sick leave onto ACC but instead do something like continuous sick leave of more than 30 days is covered by ACC (perhaps under ACC rules, 80% of pay up to a cap I think is how it works). Basically make ACC for all long term sick leave not just accidents. It seems a reasonable starting point, and is an easier jump to covering all sick leave.
The benefit of this is you don’t have to mess with the current employer funded system yet, you can leave it in place for the time being while still having better support for people who get cancer or whatever.
I’m not sure what this would do to ACC levies, but it would be interesting to at least see it calculated and considered.
Let’s be fair, this is about the best case outcome we could have hoped for. I was fully expecting a drop back to 5 days.
However, I find it a bit funny their selling argument is that it’s too hard for people making payroll software 😆.
I don’t think they deserve any credit for not being even crueler.
But lol yes won’t someone think of the payroll developers?! That’s been a common complaint across the numerous attempts to sort out the holidays act.
I can’t see how this would even help on that in this case, but I am not a software guy. Like isn’t this just introducing another category with different rules that you have to account for?
In my experience as a user of payroll software; I suspect its a combination of things.
Developers could customise the logic for New Zealand’s legislation better, but corporations think magically about software and try to buy “out of the box” solutions, even if they don’t quite fit right.
Then they rely on HR staff to try to configure their way around logic limitations so it ends up just as kludgy but in a way more reliant on people knowing why something was done some given way than just in the tool.
I’ve run into stuff you would think is really really simple - like marking the NZ public holidays as not a work day; but if those holidays change - like the addition of Matariki, or you move so you have a new provincial holiday its usually months, years or never that it gets updated.
For annual leave, having an accural system is so much simpler. The current system seems simple, but it is far from it, the main complications come around working extra to cover for others, every instance that this occurs requires a recalculation of your entitlement, in an accural system this kind instance is a non-issue.
I’m not sure about the sick pay changes, I’d have to look into it more.
How does working extra affect sick leave entitlement? My understanding is you just get paid what you otherwise would have been paid on that day, but don’t have to work it. I don’t understand how sick leave entitlement changes from extra shifts?
(Annual leave is a whole nother ballpark, and is definitely affected by extra shifts).
Not sure, at the moment it is “10 days”, but what constitutes a “day”. For salaried employees, it is really simple. For wage workers it is the normal rostered shift, but I’m not sure that it is fair.
Should you accrue sick days at 1/2 (10 days Vs 20 days) the rate of annual leave? Would that be better? This way any extra work you do would accrue extra sick leave.
The cynic in me thinks its only so hard for employers to figure out what someone’s leave entitlement is because they account for it as a liability and try to minimise how much anyone can take while maximising the times when they are forced to take it.
I can’t remember now, but wasn’t the context for the law change that shift workers who did 4 days of 12 hours, then 3 days off only getting paid the equivalent of 8 hours when they took a day of leave?
But in this case they should be paid 12 hours, because a “day” is not defined as 8 hours, but as what they would have normally worked.
Yeah - but did sick leave ever get the same clarification? The language in the forms I use at work is half day, full day off sick.
But in effect you’re asking for your shift off work - so if a shift is 12 hours then yeah I would think it would be sensible for 12 hours, I just don’t know if sick leave actually gets paid the same way.
Because its definitely not paid out as “days” - in the 24 hour sense. Like if you’re a part timer doing a 4 hour day, I can’t imagine the current law lets you have 20 shifts off right? Its more like “day” in that sense means, times not working due to being sick.
It’s not based on any particular number of hours, but rather on what they would have earned that day. So an employee working part time 4 hours a day will be paid 4 hours for a day off, so their 10 days only costs the employer half as much as an employee working full time (i.e. it ends up proportional). But funky stuff starts to happen if someone’s part time hours are 2.5 full days instead of 5 half days.
An employee gets paid their relevant daily pay (with a backup method if that’s not possible), which is laid out here.
It says it’s what they would have earned, and clarifies things like taxable allowances and overtime are included if they would have otherwise earned them that day.
Just thinking about the current rules, if you work 4 hours a day across 5 days a week, don’t you get a smaller number of paid hours off on sick leave than if you work two full days a week?
Does sick leave stay the same for people working 40 hours?
