What's with the paid time off regulations in West Hollywood?!
- Claire Baker
- Jan 24
- 2 min read
I have a bone to pick with West Hollywood.
All last week I was struggling with this PTO policy. Everything was going fine until I checked the local ordinances and found this batsh*t 2022 city ordinance in West Hollywood.
To understand why this ordinance is so crazy, first you must understand a few things about paid time off in California:
🤑 PTO = WAGES
In California, accrued vacation is considered wages. Meaning that once it’s earned, it can’t be taken away. If an employee doesn’t use their accrued vacation time before they leave their job, it needs to be paid out on their last paycheck.
You can cap it, frontload it, or call it “unlimited” or “flexible” to not track it, but proceed with caution. There’s a lot of legal precedent to make sure employers don't shaft their workers.
🤒 SICK TIME
California also has a generous paid sick time rule that dictates how much to accrue, how quickly, and how much can carry over year-to-year. As long as someone has sick time available, you essentially can’t deny the time off or discipline someone for taking it.
Unused sick time doesn’t have to be paid out at termination if it’s under a different policy from vacation. But if it has its own policy, you have to track it in a way that's consistent with the law.
Once you understand the contours of California law, it’s easy enough to navigate. And most other states more or less follow the same structure, so it’s not that difficult to calibrate multi-state policies.
☠️ WEST HOLLYWOOD
And then along comes West Hollywood, throwing drama.
WeHo has two types of protected leave, each of which follows its own accrual schedule:
Uncompensated Leave (what’s the point?) where you can take unpaid time off without getting fired
Compensated Leave that you can take for whatever reason you damned well please
Compensated Leave (CL) can fall under your combined/vacation policy, but it accrues much faster and has a higher limit than state sick time.
Which means that people can accrue up to 4.8 weeks of time off in their first year that must be paid out if it isn’t used.
You can split CL evenly between sick time and vacation time to keep people from accruing megabalances.
Then, at least, the sick portion can be satisfied by California's standard sick time regulations. Which mitigates the payout issue.
But if you take this path, you have to track vacation time under WeHo’s whacky rules.
Let me tell you... I've seen generous vacation policies, but I've never seen one that would work in WeHo.
Because if you don’t properly track vacation use and someone accrues the full balance, you have to pay out any additional time they accrue beyond the limit every 30 days (until they use some).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for giving people ample time off and I think that CA’s way of treating PTO as compensation is the right thing to do.
But this is ridiculous.
Does the idea of getting sued for missing random labor compliance policies keep you up at night? We can help.
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