Paid Time Off vs Sick/Vacation

There are different ways to handle paid time off for employees. Traditionally Sick and Vacation time, and sometimes Personal Holidays, are tracked in separate categories. Sick time generally carries over from year to year and may or may not be paid on termination. Vacation time generally is capped in some way, and is usually paid on termination. Personal Holidays aren't all that common, and tend to be use-it-or-lose-it time.

There is an increasing trend to convert all of that into a one-size-fits-all category, Paid Time Off. PTO. Some companies do it well. Others use it as a dodge to try and reduce costs. Two examples:

Used to be 10 days vacation, unlimited sick time. Now it's 18 days PTO (for new employees like me), a 200 hour cap, and no cash out. I already heard a coworker complaining on the phone to HR, and saying that he's got 150 hours that he now feels he has to take. Our project schedules are going to change in a bad way if all the old-timers take a month or two off to bring their vacation balances down.

The bad way. All times are rolled into one, is capped, and isn't paid on termination.

ours works pretty well in it's current form. PTO includes your vacation time, a week of sick days and 7 holidays. PTO is accrued each pay period. unless your boss is concerned about how many sick days you take it isn't really tracked. the cap is 450 hours. when you hit the cap, you just stop earning more until you use some of it.

they also allow us to donate PTO to both the [company] foundation and United way during those fund drives.

you can get paid out for part of each year's accrual if you set it up during open enrollment, or use the value to pay for your part of your benefit plan. They also pay out for any unused PTO when you leave the company

This company is doing it right. I also know that the second company has a significant union presence, which may explain why their PTO policies are so old-timey. The first company is a tech company where the only union presence, if any, is in the janitorial staff; staff that in all likelyhood is contracted through another agency. The first company treats PTO as a cost to be managed, where the second company treats PTO as a benefit. Its a slight difference, but it makes a big difference in terms of what employees get.

Unions make a difference.

A clarified dead-end proposal

I've gotten a couple of comments about my last post, so I figured I would try and clarify what I mean. The idea I presented was my own, and I hold no illusions about whether or not it is a good idea much less a workable one. That said, I will try and better illustrate why I presented it.

As I said, one of the main arguments against gay marriage is the claim that marriage as an institution is designed around raising children. Dan Koborg wrote an essay in 2003 that places highly in google's opinion on the topic of 'against gay marriage. You can find it here.

http://tinyurl.com/yygm3t

I'm not linking it since I don't want to 'vote' for it. But I will quote from it:

The truth of the matter is, marriage is not an institution merely based on love. Marriage is given special legal status, including tax and insurance benefits, for mainly one reason. The reason is that marriage is an institution established for children. Marriage is the only time tested, healthy arrangement for raising children that society, throughout the ages, has found. It is also a fact of life that gay couples are not physically capable of procreation.

Ignore the bad science for a moment and focus on the sentiment. This clearly states that marriage is established for children, and gay people physically can't have children so they shouldn't be awarded the marriage franchise. Keep repressing the bad science, it's irrelevant to the point I'm making here.

By this argument, it can be easily inferred that marriage should be conditional on the presence of children. Unfortunately, over the past century increasing numbers of male/female pairs have married but not ever had children. A lot of these are couples who are childless by choice, yet enjoy the married rights like visitation rights in hospital, default inheritance, and health insurance options.

My idea is to limit marriage to a much more restrictive set of people. Specifically, couples who have dependents on their tax returns or once had dependents on their tax returns. Divorce, lose your tax status and start over. Re-marry with your dependents still on your tax return, you get the status back. But if your children grow and file on their own and then you divorce, you completely lose married tax status until you marry someone with dependents.

1. Married status shall be extended to two adult couples directly involved in raising children, as determined by dependents on the tax return.
2. Married status shall continue for a couple so long as they remain married.
3. Divorce will terminate married status, and not confer rights to regain married status later.

Of course something like this is impossible without a parallel institution to catch those people who now:

• Re-marry after the kids are moved out.
• Never have kids.
• Have kids that have filed for emancipation.

An institution such as civil unions. Something that confers most of the rights of Marriage, but perhaps not the tax-advantaged status of marriage. There has to be a difference for it to be significant, but functionally they'd be very similar.

This provides several family-friendly incentives:

• A disincentive for divorce
• Encourages us to keep the US birth rate above 2.0
• Restricts marriage to those adult pairs who intend to raise children, which is, of course, one man and one woman (sssh, don't tell about artificial insemination and adoption)

It also provides one significant bonus to the increasing US deficit. The decreased number of people filing joint returns will boost tax revenues.

That said, this is a doomed proposal for a few reasons. Chief among them being that it increases taxes for a certain class of people and tax-increases are a hard sell these days. Second among them is the very real possibility of increasing taxes on retired members of AARP, a force to be taken lightly at your own risk.

Thanks to increases in longevity, it is becoming more and more common for people well north of 70 to remarry once their spouse dies. This has very real financial impacts, as marriage at that age can significantly affect who gets what money when a death happens, as well as the marriage deduction on tax returns. For those who haven't saved very well, that extra couple thousand bucks in April can mean quite a lot.

While it does address this frequently stated objection to homosexual marriage, the objection itself is fundamentally flawed. Marriage is a financial state that also happens to benefit children. Marriage is still a very useful instrument for post-menopausal women with no dependents. The argument of, "It's for the children," just doesn't hold much water.

But don't let me stop you. Go ahead and eviscerate Marriage in the legal code. We'll need a non-marriage framework anyway, and I'll be right here to help build it.

A dead-end proposal

This is going nowhere, for a couple of reasons. First off it disenfranchises a significant portion of American tax-payers, including the all powerful AARP. We do not disenfranchise people, that's not what America is all about. On the other hand, we are good at maintaining the status-quo with white knuckles if need be, no matter how much the franchise (whichever it is) is being extended beyond our borders. But it's an interesting idea anyway, and may even provide increased tax revenues!

The rallying cry against same-sex marriage is that children need a parent of both sexes in order to develop correctly. In fact, the majority of the hubub is over Save The Children! Which is bunkum, but that hasn't stopped politics in the past.

This seems to imply that you marry in order to have children. This isn't the case for an increasing percentage of married couples (under existing laws no less), so I challenge this assumption. That being said, there are ways to address this problem.

Make marriage rights contingent on dependents. This will require setting up a separate legal framework, such as civil unions, to bequeath the other married rights such as default inheritance, visitation rights, and ability to make medical decisions without a lot of pre-existing paperwork. 'Married filing jointly' can be kept, relegating the civilly united to independent Filer status.

Marriage would be a legally recognized relation state between two adults who intend to raise children. A tax return with the required declared dependent(s) has to be in within five years of filing for marriage, or you forfeit the five years of tax benefits. A civil union can be converted into a marriage at any time, so long as the dependent(s) show up in good time. Divorce before the dependents show up, pay the tax penalty.

The Marriage survives after the last child stops being a dependent. However, this status does not follow after divorce. Once the Marriage is dissolved, the two members start from scratch with their next civil union/marriage.

This has several merits:

1. It provides a disincentive for divorce.
2. It provides more tax revenue, as the numbers of 'married filing jointly' will fall.
3. It provides an incentive to keep the birth-rate above 2.0.
   
4. It restricts marriage to those who intend to raise children.

This'll never fly since AARP members who file jointly would be summarily kicked off that status. But still, it does seem to address the prime claim of the same-sex marriage detractors.

Caucus vs. Primary

Very few states use caucuses for nominations anymore. Most have moved to primaries. In Minnesota the caucus has been losing a bit of steam, but at least the DFL has been trying to make it more meaningful. The demand to 'abide' by the endorsement process, or not run in the Primary if you lose the caucus, is a pass/fail condition to getting an endorsement. If you won't abide, then don't bother seeking the endorsement.

Once upon a time I supported that, but I can no longer do so in good conscience. Caucuses are generally attended by those who believe strongly in their values. Or put another way, radicals. Less and less common are those who've always attended and still attend because that's just what you do. That's the camp I sit in.

Caucuses have been radicalized out of relevance. Only the ideologically pure can make it through, and generally speaking ideologically pure people aren't electable in any but the most secure districts. It is no coincidence that Presidential candidates universally make a dive towards the center after the nominating convention.

The battle for the open Minnesota 5th congressional district is quite telling. Martin Sabo has held that seat for decades. His seniority is quite high, which is why he is the ranking minority member of the House appropriations committee for Homeland Security. During the brief period where the Democrats held Congress and the President he was chair of the budget committee. This is a member of Congress who is in a position to do great things for Minnesota.

Yet he kept getting challenges from the left. One of the reasons he cited for stepping down this year is that he is tired of fighting through the endorsement process. Each year it got harder and harder to get through the endorsement, even though he is a seated incumbent. He was either too white, too male, or too old-school. The worrying from the left abated briefly after Vento (MN 4th CD) died and Betty McCullom was elected; Minnesota had a woman in Congress again, so pressure for Sabo to step down in order to elect one quieted down.

The man who received the endorsement for the 5th CD was a black man from north Minneapolis who has not held any prior political office. His primary claims to fame were activist based, which means he can write a rousing speech. Unfortunately, his campaign apparatus was weak and he had some skeletons in his closet that were embarrassing. During the primary campaign he had a lot of negative press stemming from his behavior to missed Federal Elections Commission filings. The 5th CD is a safe seat for the democrats, so intra-party fuding will happen. The endorsed candidate made the primary, and will be on the general ballot, and will almost certainly be the next congressman from the 5th CD and the first black congressman from Minnesota.

That said, Martin Sabo's chief of staff has openly declared her support for the Independence Party candidate Tammy Lee. Ideologically the IP candidate is closer to Martin than the DFL candidate, which says a lot. This is how the party has evolved.

The 'rank and file' party members are always more center oriented than the activists. This extends to the Republicans as much as it does the Democrats. The Republicans experienced this particular phenomena in 1994 when the endorsed candidate, Allan Quist, got stomped in the primary by more moderate Arne Carlson. This is why increasing voter turnout during primaries tends to benefit the more moderate candidate.

Caucuses have been radicalized out of relevance. It is time to deemphasize them. Which won't happen, since the party apparatus, run by those same activists, is so intent on retaining them as the chief ideology enforcement tool. Perhaps it is time for a grass-roots movement of old time political hacks to get the party constitution changed?

How remarkably consistent, redux

Back in May I cited some new CDC guidelines about how women should treat themselves as pregnant at all times. I thought that was a silly thing, even though it makes sense considering who is in charge at the moment. I wish it got better.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2619061&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

It turns out that they're now Health and Human Services is recommending that the states focus their out-of-wedlock birth reduction programs on women in the 12-29 demographic! If you're as cynical as I am about this, you already know what method they recommend for that.

That's right! Just Say No To Sex!

It worked so bleedingly well with the under-18 set, why not try it with sexually and emotionally mature women!

Pointless. Purely, simply, absolutely, pointless. That's right up there with, "let them eat cake."

The problem they have is sex out of marriage. Apparently children aren't raised right unless there is a man married to the woman of the house. Want to have sex at an early age? Marry the guy first!

What is most especially aggravating about this is that if the Democrats do manage to gain control of both the House and Senate it won't do a damned bit of good. The people the Democrats had to make deals with to get into power tend to be the pro-religion, anti-abortion kind who also like social support programs. These are people who are happy with abstinence-based sex ed and social policy. These are the people that the Democrats need to keep happy in order to stay in power. Don't expect a roll-back of anti-abortion legislation under the potential new House and Senate.

I'm just disgusted.