Limits on Vacation Accrual

How much vacation can Workers Accrue?

Questions for consideration:

Q: In the future, how long should workers be allowed to hold onto sick and vacation hours before they have to use them or lose them?

The ideas I have heard so far:

A. "No limits." Just let us accumulate vacation hours forever without any limit.

[This is easy to do. The disadvantage is that it would potentially cost us a bunch of money someday when someone quits and cashes in a large amount of vacation days.]

B. "Use it or lose it." After a certain amount of time [one year, two years] vacation hours are given up and no longer owed.

[This limits the amount of vacation time a person can take at a time (for good or for ill) and encourages people to take vacation time more frequently. By adjusting how long we let vacation days accumulate we can change how this affects us.]

C. "Use it or it turns into sick only time." Just like B, except that instead of losing the time, it goes into an account that can only be used for long term sick leave (that is, after your regular sick and vacation time is used up, if you still need more sick time, this is where it would come from). If you never get that sick, you lose it.

D. "Use it or we pay you for it." Just like B, except that you get an extra amount tacked onto your paycheck as if you'd worked the hours you have coming to you in vacation.

[D is kind of like B from Free Geek's liability perspective, that is we force people to use their vacation (or get paid for it) from time to time. This prevents Free Geek from accumulating an ever growing liability owed to its workers. But it means we expect ourselves to be able to actually have the cash to pay ourselves, should that ever happen. From the worker's perspective it doesn't encourage people to take time off, but instead gives them extra money.]

[All of options B, C, and D have some kind of time out clause associated with them. We can implement this as either X number of [days, weeks, months, years] from when the vacation time was accrued, or we can do in on a regular schedule. For instance, we can say if you accumulated the time in one year, it must be used by the end of the next year. In that case, if you accumulated a week of vacation in 2002, you'd have to use that week by the end of 2003 and you could not carry it over to 2004.]

In all the above cases we are saying that vacation hours are spent in the same order that they're accrued (except in option C, where some old hours are only available for long term sick leave). That is, if you have hours left over from last year, they get used before the hours you accrue this year.