Special leave bank accepts deposits

Published June 26, 2006

by JOANNE WOJCIK

jwojcik@BusinessInsurance.com

illness or injury.

Benefits Manager Paul Hackleman developed the program that allows employees to donate some of their unused paid time off in response to discussions during collective bargaining that employees wanted to do something to help their fellow employees, he said.

"We set it up so vacation, holiday time, comp time for certain groups--which are all vested time that has to be paid out--that would be the contribution," he explained.

Under California law, all workers vest in their vacation, holiday and compensation time. Any unused time in a given year can be carried over into subsequent years or must be translated into cash when workers terminate employment. Sick time can accrue similarly but does not vest, and employers decide whether to cash out unused accrued sick time.

Under San Mateo County's program, employees are permitted to donate time to the catastrophic leave bank. Initial donations must be at least eight hours and subsequent donations must be in one-hour increments.

The county monitored the program for several years, due to uncertainty as to how this new benefit would play out. "One of things was that we found was that higher salaried individuals donated to lower salaried individuals, so that the county was inadvertently deriving a benefit from it, which wasn't our intent," Mr. Hackleman said.

The county then restructured the leave so that "for every four hours of (donated) vested time, you could contribute an hour of sick leave time," he said. "That was intended to offset that pattern" of the county benefiting from the program.

For example, if an individual terminates employment with 200 hours of sick leave on the books, he or she could contribute those 200 hours to the catastrophic leave bank. Otherwise, that time would expire upon termination.

Since 2001, 3,062 employee donors have given up 46,663 hours of their paid time off. Some 189 employees have taken advantage of the program.