this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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A Boring Dystopia

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

Simply being able to swap sick days is such a foreign concept to me. How does that even work or make sense? I understand being allowed to take a day or several off because you are sick without having to hand in a doctor's note. So those are your sick days. YOUR sick days. The fact that you can transfer these or use them as currency is just baffling to me. I guess this is some MUH-FREEDOM joke that I'm to European for to understand because I don't get it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'll take a stab at explaining from my (limited) experience. US schools receive funding from many sources, but the budget is set locally (usually once a year) by administrators and approved by a locally elected school board. When administrators make the budget they have to estimate how much money to set aside to pay substitute teachers. The administrators don't know which or how many teachers will get sick so they distribute sick hours to the teaching staff evenly. You can think of sick hours kind of like getting 'shares' in the substitute fund. Now as teachers work for a district over time these sick hours continue to accrue. Basically it means teachers who have worked there for a long amount of time and haven't needed to use the hours have hundreds of 'shares' in the substitute fund. People with a lot of accrued hours can transfer them to other employees. The amount of 'shares' in the substitute fund stays the same, but the 'owners' change. Meaning the giver loses their promise of substitute coverage, but the district can continue paying for both the sick teacher's salary AND a substitute teacher to cover their classroom, AND buy those new crayons they promised. Hope that all made sense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

So you outsource the risk of managing an organization to the workers?

Late stage capitalism indeed...

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