Giving A Gift Of Peace Of Mind Public Employees Can Donate Unused Sick Leave Pay To Help Co-Workers In Need

In her battle with cancer, teacher Kathy Pandiani will miss the entire school year.

She used up accrued personal sick leave in February, but the elementary school physical education teacher will lose only about a month of pay, thanks to a little help from her friends in the Tacoma School District.

The district is among public employers in Washington state that allow employees to use some of their co-workers’ sick leave.

Having co-workers contribute their sick leave “makes you feel supported and valued,” Pandiani said. “Them giving me sick leave is like a gift - it’s offering me more time to heal,” she said.

Although leave banks are common and well-organized in the public sector, they are much less common in the private sector largely because of cost concerns.

Private companies that do have organized employee self-help systems tend to have a large number of workers because economies of scale make the programs more practical.

The federal and Washington state governments allow their employees to participate in shared-leave programs.

But such programs are “not something you see too much in the private sector,” said Barry Lawrence, spokesman for the Society for Human Resource Management.

That’s because the programs can become administrative headaches for employers to manage.

“The public and government sectors have done it for a long time, so it kind of becomes par for the course there,” he said.

Lawrence said there are many other reasons leave banks are not common in the private sector.

Most government workers receive payment of some sort for any unused sick leave, but that is not true for employees of most private firms. So a company may figure it would lose too much money to allow its workers to donate their sick leave to a co-worker, he said.

And the government employs a great number of people, meaning there is a larger pool of workers from which to draw.

Another difference between public- and privatesector workers is that most private-sector employees cannot store up compensatory time - time worked over 40 hours in one week, Lawrence said.

A national survey found that in 1994, only 8 percent of private companies allowed employees to pool and share sick days.

In comparison, 64 Washington state agencies - which employed 99 percent of state workers - offered shared-leave programs last year.

The value of sick leave shared among state workers in fiscal year 1997 was about $3 million, according to the report.