PTO v Vacation

[Doe Be Doe]

Question: I notice that folks now refer time off work as PTO. I’ve always used the phrase vacation day. When did OTO start being used?

[KeepItReal]

7 minutes ago, Doe Be Doe said:

Question: I notice that folks now refer time off work as PTO. I’ve always used the phrase vacation day. When did OTO start being used?

OTO?? I just lost it! Thanks for the laugh!🤣

[KeepItReal]

8 minutes ago, Doe Be Doe said:

Question: I notice that folks now refer time off work as PTO. I’ve always used the phrase vacation day. When did OTO start being used?

To answer your question. Many firms in the early 2000s started consolidating time off.  Instead of 15 days vacation, 5 sick days, 2 floating holidays for religious holidays and 3 days bereavement leave they just gave everyone 15 days PTO. Use it as you wish. Less administration and more work days overall for the employee. They also started limiting how many days of PTO you can carry over to the next year. 🤓

[Phil_musc]

All right, I'm just stupid. I'll admit it. What is PTO and OTO?

[mike carey]

It varies in different countries. 'Paid time off' is often used for various workplace entitlements like the ones KeepItReal listed that are available at short notice, but not including annual leave. In Australia there are statutory requirements for four weeks of annual leave for permanent employees and any PTO is in addition to this (some types of PTO are required by statute, some are not). I have always interpreted 'vacation' as being what we would call going on holidays, that is time away from home not just away from work.

[Doe Be Doe]

Oops. My proofreading sucks. OTO should have been PTO.

So saying vacation day instead of PTO shows I’m old? I can live with that.

[spider]

We have vacation days and also what they call Personal Holidays. They came from turning in a whole bunch of more minor holidays and they now float, to take when we want to, I think there are 5 and there are some restrictions like 1 per quarter, the theory is that they're meant to be occasional and not taken in a bunch, but no one ways any attention, and we don't do any time reporting anyway. I think the personal days were to avoid paying a lot of overtime to those people who were required to work on more minor holidays.

[BuffaloKyle]

At my company we have vacation weeks, 1 to 5, depending on your service time that you have to take as a week no breaking up the days. Then 2 personal days and 2 floating holidays. Then I believe it's NY state that provides sick days. We have 5 sick days we can use as well during the year but if you don't use them we get it added to our checks at the end of the year. I never used mine so it was like a nice bonus 

[Rudynate]

25 years ago or so.  I think on my last job before I became self-employed, we had one big block of time, called PTO, that could be used for vacation, sick days, or occasional mental health days.

[Luv2play]

I'm not sure about Japan but amongst the G7 countries, the USA lags far behind other advanced countries for vacation, sick leave, parental leave etc.

In Canada, when I started working in 1973, I was entitled to 3 weeks vacation, 13 days sick leave and all could be carried over. When I retired 25 years later, I had over 260 days of sick leave and it all went up on smoke. I did use all my accumulated vacation in the form of severance pay. 

I think over the whole time I only took a couple of sick days annually except for my second year when I had an eye operation and needed a month to recuperate in a darkened room. My employer advanced me the time as I had not accumulated enough.

[Mercury]

12 hours ago, Rudynate said:

25 years ago or so.  I think on my last job before I became self-employed, we had one big block of time, called PTO, that could be used for vacation, sick days, or occasional mental health days.

Same for where I work. All PTO hours are in one “bank” for you to use. We also have Covid Hours in a separate  bank that I think is considered workers comp?  I believe this might be a state requirement. All employees have 80 hours that begin in. 2020, renewed again in 2021 and 2022. 

[BuffaloKyle]

12 hours ago, Mercury said:

Same for where I work. All PTO hours are in one “bank” for you to use. We also have Covid Hours in a separate  bank that I think is considered workers comp?  I believe this might be a state requirement. All employees have 80 hours that begin in. 2020, renewed again in 2021 and 2022. 

Yeah my previous employer had this too. The cool thing was let's say you had 120 hours to use. You would pick a day you wanted off and put down how many hours of pay you wanted. So you could take days off with 8 hours pay but you could also take a day off and just get 6 or 7 hours pay so you can get some extra days out of it. They also offered an option where you could buy extra vacation hours at the beginning of the year and deduct it from your check. I never got why people did that. You're not gaining anything out of it unless you get a big pay raise I guess because then you get your money you paid for vacation back at a higher rate.

[+ sam.fitzpatrick]

Yes, most companies either offer vacation + sick days (vacation always being pre-planned and sick days being just that) OR offer PTO - which can be used however an employee wishes.  

PTO works well for many reasons:

1)  Employees do not need to lie about being sick to take an unplanned day.

2)  Employees who never use sick days don't feel they get the short end of the stick by working 10 more days a year than their co-workers who used all of their sick days.

3)  Employees who have sick relatives are able to allocate more PTO days to 'sick day' purposes than was traditionally allocated.  

4)  As mentioned earlier, it is an easier process for the employer to administer one pool of time off versus two.