The Office of Personnel Management earlier this week finalized regulations allowing federal employees — both gay and straight — to take leave to attend to their sick or deceased domestic partners. What do you think about this? Have you needed this benefit to help care for your partner? Or has your manager been willing to look the other way and give you the time you needed for your partner or your partner’s relatives? Federal Times would like to hear from you. E-mail me at slosey@federaltimes.com if you’d like to talk. If you’re more comfortable with speaking anonymously, that’s fine too.
Browsing: sick leave
Federal employees will be able to take leave to attend to their sick or deceased domestic partners beginning July 14, under final regulations issued today by the Office of Personnel Management. Feds also will be able to take up to 13 days of sick leave to care for their domestic partners or their partners’ parents, children or grandchildren. And agencies will be able to advance feds up to 13 days of sick leave if they are out of leave. Take note that these changes will apply equally to both unmarried heterosexual and homosexual domestic partnerships. The Obama administration recently extended long…
Retired federal employee James Stephens writes in a new op-ed piece on FederalTimes.com that managers should forget about trying to define and respond to sick leave abuse: I did not abuse sick leave … I treated my sick leave as an asset to be used. At one point, I had more than 1,500 hours of accumulated sick leave. On the day I retired I had no balance. He explains: The problem is that managers pretend that the problem is employees who abuse something that isn’t theirs. … Agencies should view excessive sick leave as a symptom of another problem, depression,…
The House approved a measure tonight that would allow federal employees under the Federal Employees Retirement System to count their unused sick leave toward their retirement pension calculations. The measure could bring the newer FERS system in line with the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), which always allowed that calculation. The Disabled Military Retiree Relief Act of 2009, H.R. 2990, passed in a 404-0 vote. It now moves to the Senate, which stripped similar provisions from a bill giving the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco. In addition, to allowing FERS employees count sick their unused leave toward…
Update: HR 1804 passed by a unanimous voice vote today. It will now head to the Senate, which is expected to consider the bill as part of the larger tobacco bill. Original post: The House is preparing to vote on a bill containing several provisions affecting federal employees this afternoon. HR 1804, the Federal Retirement Reform Act, would: Automatically enroll all new employees in the Thrift Savings Plan’s G Fund. The Pentagon would decide on its own whether new military service members would be automatically enrolled. Create a Roth 401(k) option in the TSP. Allow the board governing the TSP to…
Reps. James Moran, D-Va., and Frank Wolf, R-Va., just reintroduced a bill that would allow employees under the Federal Employees Retirement System to count unused sick leave as time toward their annuities. The sponsors of the FERS Sick Leave Equity Act, which has not yet been assigned a number, say it will save the government $68 million per year by cutting down on employees’ lost productivity. Because FERS employees currently lose all of their sick leave credit when they leave the government, Moran said many start to suffer from the so-called “FERS flu” as they near retirement: FERS’ use it or lose it system for…
Rep. James Moran, D-Va., is preparing to reintroduce a bill that would allow employees under the Federal Employees Retirement System to count unused sick leave as time toward their annuities. Moran spokesman Austin Durrer said the bill could be reintroduced as early as next week. A previous sick leave bill sponsored by Moran was attached to a tobacco bill approved by the House last year, but the Senate’s version did not have a similar provision and the sick leave proposal did not survive.