Leave policy needs fix

Taxpayers aren’t just responsible for paying salaries and health insurance benefits for public employees. They’re required to compensate them for unused vacation and sick time, too. At the moment state taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of state employees’ accrued, unused time off, and as we wrote last week, Gov. Charlie Baker is pushing to at least cap the amount of unused sick leave an employee can cash in.

But it’s not just state taxpayers who are on the hook. The city of Boston has its own sizeable liability for “compensated absences” — at $200.3 million it’s a figure that, according to an update from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, has grown by 13.4 percent over the past five years. Most of that amount, 71.3 percent, is for unused sick leave.

Like the commonwealth, Boston needs to consider its own cap on sick leave payouts.

Unused vacation days are considered part of an employee’s earned compensation. Sick days are different, intended to be used only in the event of illness.

But in Boston some city employees can redeem unused sick days for cash every year, depending on their contract or position (quite an incentive to come to work when you’re battling the flu). In fiscal 2015 those payments totaled $30 million.

And like state employees they’re also entitled to cash out a portion of their unused sick days when they quit or retire. Given the size of the liability for all that unused time, the research bureau advises the city to reevaluate the policies for sick leave payouts. Indeed it should.

Boston has reached agreement with one union to cap sick leave payouts at $15,000 — still exceedingly generous. For the sake of taxpayers and the city treasury we hope that becomes a trend.