using leave for a funeral

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If a coworker dies and the employees who worked directly with that person go to the funeral on a work day, do you think those coworkers should have to use their annual leave?
or do you think it would be a nice gesture of the company to let poeple go to the funeral without using personal leave.
Production will not be affected and the business stays open.

My boss died in the 1990's and the whole department and more from the company went to his memorial service and no leave was taken. I don't remember any discussion at all about taking leave.

[Anonymous]

Bereavement is normally for immediate family, but considering it is a coworker you'd think your company would make an exception. If they don't, then you have to use PTO.

[Anonymous]

No. I don't see how they should get free annual leave for a coworker's funeral when they wouldn't get free annual leave for a child, parent or spouse funeral?

I'm a fed and my bereavement leave is my sick leave. Are they separate elsewhere?

[Anonymous]

As a federal contractor I cannot see a situation where my company would "pay" us to go to a funeral for a coworker.

If we get paid, that money has to come from somewhere and we would not be able to bill that to the government. That would mean the company would have to pay it from overhead, which is never never never going to happen because that is money directly out of the pockets of management.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No. I don't see how they should get free annual leave for a coworker's funeral when they wouldn't get free annual leave for a child, parent or spouse funeral?

I'm a fed and my bereavement leave is my sick leave. Are they separate elsewhere?

Yes we get separate bereavement leave at my job. It's kinda stingy (4 days for spouse, sibling, child, parent, 2 days for grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, 1 day for in-laws) but it's there.

We have had CW's and husbands/wives of CW's pass on, kind of part of having an older workforce, and they never made us use PTO to attend the services. It's just counted as admin time for a few hours. Now it's not the whole company going or anything, usually just their close friends and their boss, so it's a few hours of admin time for maybe 5 people. It sucks that there are places that won't do that. What is this world coming to.

[Anonymous]

In my agency we all had to use annual leave to attend a manager's funeral - her husband had passed. It wasn't as if we could skip it, even if we wanted too.

[Anonymous]

I'll take the other side of this argument and say I can see in some cases why employers would require use of leave.

At least in a federal government job, not doing so would mean paying people to use their time attending someone's funeral. Nice? Yes. Morally right? Probably. Something taxpayers would be ok with funding? Most likely not, I would think.

Custodians of the people's resources, and all. Can lead to some annoyingly restrictive policies at times, but I'm not sure I see an acceptable alternative.