Unlawful Provisions of the PSU Unearned Sick Leave Advance Policy to be Removed
October 12, 2012
By Phil Lesch
In 2009 Human Resources changed the PSU policy on access to faculty unearned sick leave advance bank to require faculty members who voluntarily purchased Short term disability (STD) to exhaust that disability, and then exhaust Long term Disability (LTD), before being eligible to access the statutory Unearned Sick Leave advance bank. They did not notify PSU-AAUP of the policy change as required by law and the CBA, and we only learned of it when a very sick faculty member was harmed by the policy in 2011.
The policy has been problematic and harmful in a number of ways:
- It unfairly discriminated against faculty members who paid for voluntary benefits for a statutory benefit that had no such provision. This made the policy unlawful.
- It created a separate and distinct threshold and unlawful delay in access to the unearned sick leave advance benefit in that employees had to apply to an insurance company for STD benefits first. The application process for STD can take weeks, and the threshold is much higher and requires medical certification which is not required for use of unearned sick leave advance. During the time that the employee waited for approval of STD they would lapse into unpaid status even if they had an unearned sick leave advance balance. This, too, was unlawful.
- It effectively removed a statutory financial obligation to faculty unilaterally across the bargaining unit without bargaining.
Phil Lesch met with Carol Mack and David Reese, PSU Chief Counsel about the matter on two occasions in late 2011 and early 2012 and they jointly decided to wait until Shana Seachrist assumed the Associate Vice President of HR position to seek the policy change. Phil Lesch met with Shana in August soon after she started about the matter. She followed up with PSU-AAUP today with notice that the unlawful provision- the requirement to use STD and LTD first before using the unearned sick leave advance- would be removed from the policy immediately. It would not require the formal policy revision process.
This was a great victory, one for which we should all be grateful… especially those faculty members who get ill and will now have seamless access to the unearned sick leave advance bank as intended in the OAR.