My company is one of those that makes you use PTO for both vacation and sick leave. You can only accrue about 10 hours a month, and it caps at around 2 weeks/year.
When the pandemic first started, they were pretty responsible, which is good since it's a medical laboratory. In addition to requiring masks, they gave everyone 40 hours to be used specifically for staying home if you had COVID (you had to prove you had COVID to use these hours). There is also a vaccine mandate.
However, since the pandemic “ended” earlier this year, my company removed the mask mandate and took away any unused hours of the pandemic pay.
Now, they've started circulating emails about how just under half of employee tests are coming back with COVID, and they are asking people to stay home for 5 days if they test positive. They are heavily encouraging people to “do their part,” and wear a mask/stay home if they feel sick.
The problem is that they expect us to use our PTO to do this. In a company that has a lot of new-hires, many people will only have 20-40 hours accrued at this point. And other people, like me, have worked hard to get enough PTO for the time off we want/need.
In addition, you can't request unpaid time off. So you can't opt to save PTO and just not get paid for a few days. They will forcibly take PTO to make sure you get 40 hours minimum every week.
This company is asking me to put the my work “family” and their health above my mental well-being, and then act like it's MY responsibility to protect people when they are perfectly capable of requiring masks again and providing sick leave.
It makes me feel like a selfish person, but I honestly value my PTO and family time over the health of my coworkers. If I feel COVID symptoms coming on, I don't even want to test. I just want to wear an N95, and keep going to work, pretending it's allergies.
It sucks that there are such easy solutions to these problems, but the company would rather the workforce bear the brunt of the “let's all work together” mentality.
And they wonder why they have a difficult time maintaining employees.