Know Your Rights – Who Owns Your Leaves?

With a large body of our 100,000 represented employees working remotely on a part- or full-time basis, it’s good to know the difference between various kinds of leaves that we earn as part of the many hard-earned rights contained in our contract.

There are more than a dozen types of leaves, ranging from vacation time, sick time, and holidays all the way to jury duty, bereavement leave, and the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). So, it’s not surprising that questions often arise as to the proper way to manage leave time.

Here are some common-sense tips that explain leaves in plain language, and who “owns” different types of leaves.

We all know we get vacation time or annual leave. That’s time the employee owns. When you’re on vacation or annual leave, you don’t have to take calls from your employer and you don’t have to do work for your employer. You’re on your own time.

Then there’s sick leave. The employee doesn’t own sick leave. Your employer owns sick leave. But still, if you’re on sick leave, you don’t have to take calls from your employer, you don’t have to do work while you’re on sick leave.”

Those same rules apply with the Personal Leave Program, Compensatory Time Off, your personal holidays or your Personal Development days.

However, there’s some possible confusion regarding Administrative Time Off (ATO). With Administrative Time Off, you are still on the clock for the employer. You have to answer your phone and you have to be available to work. You’re not just “off,” which means you must be available to the employer.

Many of the leaves our represented employees earn are described in Section 8 of our contract. If you’re interested in learning more, use our new online contract search tool, at contract.seiu1000.org

If you’ve got questions about your hard-earned contract rights, speak to your Local 1000 job steward, or contact the Member Resource Center at 866-471-SEIU (7348).