Are you entitled to paid leave?

There is nothing more fun, as the year staggers to an end, to do that traditional review (now that Christmas is safely past and no one is looking to see if you have been naughty or nice) of the previous year, about to be safely behind us.

From an industrial relations point of view, human resource stakeholders will prepare to make that usual curious ritual of wiping clean all staff absenteeism records and starting every employee’s entitlement calculation anew in January.

There is a difference between an eligibility to paid days absence from work to an entitlement to such leave, such as during a public holiday. This should be made clear at the time of the annual review and should be reflected in the employment contract or company policy, as may be required by the accounts department, for budgeting reasons.

For the sake of conjecture, let us say the eligibility allocation is a total of 14 days, including absences from full-time work other than public holidays, which are statutory.

They can include personal, bereavement, emergency, exam, casual or business leave for one thing or another.

Assuming the total number of eligible paid "off" days is 14 annually plus the 16 statutory ones, theoretically making a total of 30. The employee’s record will be checked by the HR department to see how many days the individual being examined had taken during the year and how many days they have left.

I was asked one year by a new person in an HR department, who called up to ask if an employee could reserve sick leave in advance. When I asked what that was for, was it to undergo a scheduled operation? She replied, “No. He wants to take all his sick leave in November this year to go shopping in New York.”

I still have not got over that one. It is a reflection of the entitlement culture that has developed in TT.

Paid leave is like a bank account according to that concept, but there is a difference. A benefit is only an entitlement if the reason for it is present and verifiable. Unless you can prove that you are going to be certifiably ill in November, you cannot book sick leave for those months in advance. Bereavement leave is an entitlement in most organisations, but only if a listed relative has died. In a bank, if $14 is deposited at the beginning of the year and no dollars are withdrawn throughout that year, and $14 is deposited again at the beginning of a new year, the depositor will have $28. But it does not work that way with employee benefits except in the public service where untaken vacation leave in senior categories accumulates, and leave earned at $50 a waged hour when an employee begins is then valued upon retirement at $200 a waged hour. In the private sector, most HR policies have a cap on vacation leave. Either you take it when scheduled or forfeit it unless the inability to take the leave when scheduled is by the request of the organisation for business reasons.

In employment contracts, what has evolved is that no matter how many days of paid sick leave you took last year, even if you took the full allocation and more, at the start of 2024, you begin again with the full 14 days. There was, however, a time when employees and their union reps demanded payment for sick days not taken, the logic being that, in addition to a normal day's pay for days worked, a worker should also get an extra day’s bonus for working while well, an extension of the accumulated benefit idea.

The implications of the concept of accumulated benefit entitlement came to me when I interviewed a public servant some time ago, who was perhaps seeing the writing on the wall about what was coming with the World Bank looking at TT’s eligibility for a structural adjustment loan (which a few worried people in the government employ for some reason translate into a possible cutback on staff, something about non-contributory pension liabilities, I do not know about that). There are so many differences between public service employment and private sector ones that you cannot generalise. I understood that public servants working in senior staff positions who do not actually take their allocated vacation leave each year get increased leave allocations as the years go by, and if their job does not allow them to take it every year, they just add that leave eligibility on to the previous year's unused leave. That is what accumulated leave eligibility means, so that when they finally do get to take it, usually just before they either resign, retire or are asked to vacate the position due to redundancy as a result of digitalisation, leave earned at $50 an hour will probably be taken at $200 an hour. In addition, if there is genuine redundancy, there will be severance pay at three weeks pay per year of service for monthly-paid employees or more if already agreed by the employee and the organisation. I have seen contracts granting up to three month's pay for each year of service worked and of course, earned pension. For the rest of their lives.

It is not as much as it sounds, one senior state executive explained. Jwala Rambarran, former governor of the Central Bank was awarded $7.5 million (less tax, of course) for an unwarranted job loss which reflected what he would have earned between 2015 when he was terminated and 2023 when his contract would have otherwise ended. This works out to be $937,500 a year, which, in turn, if my cell phone calculator is correct, works out to only $78,125 a month. Less PAYE tax, national insurance, health surcharge and so on. That sounds a lot to me, but to the professional applicant I interviewed referred to earlier, it was an entitlement. He turned down the job offer he was applying for unless he could get the equivalent of the accumulated benefit he would have earned if he stayed where he was and could look forward to an even heftier severance pay.

It is a funny old world, isn’t it?