Civil Servants & Public Healthcare Worker Can Convert Unused Leave into Cash or Carry Over to 2021

If you’re a healthcare worker or civil servant, you’ve probably been working your butt off for the whole of 2020.

While most us of have been binging food and shows on Netflix, doctors, nurses, contact tracers, and officials have been hard at work attending to patients and devising ways to contain the Covid-19 outbreak.

Even though infections have gone down significantly, the battle against the coronavirus will rage on even after we leave 2020 behind.

Fortunately, a new initiate seeks to reward these persevering men and women.

Civil Servants & Public Healthcare Worker Can Convert Unused Leave into Cash or Carry Over to 2021

Civil servants and healthcare workers now have a reason to celebrate.

Why?

Because you’ll be given a longer period to clear your unused leave, and can even cash in on it.

I am indeed. 

At the moment, civil servants are only allowed to bring forward their unused leave from 2019 to 2020, meaning any leave left unutilized will be forfeited.

But with this new initiative, some 85,000 civil servants will be able to carry forward half of 2019’s annual leave into 2021 if they’ve not used it by the end of 2020.

Not just that, they also have the option of cashing it in under the new policy, according to ST.

This is incredibly useful, as civil servants get a total of 18 days of annual leave, or 21 if they’ve worked in the industry for more than 10 years.

The move was announced by the Public Service Division (PSD) on Tuesday (3 Nov).

“This is a one-off measure to recognise the efforts of our officers in fighting the Covid-19 situation, and as a result are unable to consume their accumulated vacation leave”, PSD said.

Similarly, our healthcare workers will also be offered this option.

Just like civil servants, they will be able to encash or carry forward any unused leave from 2019 to 2021.

The only difference is that they can only bring forward a third of their unused leave.

Around 60,000 public healthcare workers are expected to benefit from this new scheme.

Not Applicable to Private Sector

This one-off leave policy may not be applicable to healthcare workers in the private sector, however.

For one, unlike public healthcare workers, those working in the private sector are less restricted to travel, and would have more opportunities to clear their leave.

On the other hand, public healthcare workers may not be able to clear their leave because they’ve been treating Covid-19 patients since the virus emerged at the start of the year.

Moreover, businesses in the private sector may have faced closures during the circuit breaker, and suffered a huge loss in revenue as a result.

This means that they may not be in a position to offer their employees flexibility when it comes to their leave.

Meanwhile, I’m still haggling with my boss to get 1 hour of leave a day.

Boss: You mean lunchtime?

That’s it.

Boss: Maybe next year.