Barry Alvarez takes home an extra $1.18M in unused PTO
Oh sorry, it looks like it was. The PTO was only a portion. Carry on.
But Alvarez banked the maximum amount of vacation time allowed over his 31 years at UW as football coach and athletic director, leaving him with 1,272 hours — more than 31 weeks — of unused leave. He elected for a one-time payout of $301,133, minus withholdings, to cash out that balance.
How does this compare to the University Michigan policy?
For normal UofM employees - the max is 384 hours. You would also get paid out unused sick time for the year, which could be up to 120 hours.
Lol glad we leave the absurd PTO time for the high paid execs.
The plebs will start earning six hours of pto a month after a six month probation period and they’ll like it”
And that absence better be pre-approved at least a month in advance.
And as a manager, I’ll make sure to remind you how annoyed I am with you using your PTO by making passive-aggressive remarks and complimenting others in the department for putting in extra time.
My old boss was the best at this. He had over 6 weeks a year he could use. He would split them so he basically got 10 weeks off a year. He clearly was paid enough to be able to take some of those as partially unpaid by splitting them. His boss would call and ask people why they weren’t using vacation time and we’re losing it and it’s because my boss never approved them. Basically said there had to be enough coverage for people to take vacation. So one of the senior members who got 5 weeks a year lost 3 weeks. Anyone who did actually get to use their vacation got scolded the next time my boss was in.
Suffice to say I quit that job a month ago after 8 years. Found 8 of my staff members new jobs and their last days were all last Friday. They only have one member of the management team left and he’s being terminated at the end of the month for theft. Basically it was an extremely toxic place to work. They now are open half of the hours they should be due to lack of staff and everyone in Bloomington knows to stay far away from that place.
Good for you and your colleagues! That type of shit makes me sick
Are you a former State Farm corporate worker like myself?
"...and he’s being terminated at the end of the month for theft."
Wait. This guy stole something from the company, so they're letting him remain employed until the end of the month? WTF kind of place is this? I'd have him out before the end of the day he was caught!
It's a pretty messed up company as you can tell. They even have him on video and a witness that watched it all happened. They showed up July 1st to terminate him and realized the whole staff was about to be gone and decided they needed him a while so they just left. And meanwhile he is doing a whole lot of other shady stuff in the meantime.
Fuck Barry Alvarez
Got a $500 check when I left my first job out of college and felt like a baller
Now I feel like a pleb
The system, working as it's meant to. It's a small club and we ain't invited.
Speak for yourself
I don’t know that Alvarez was necessarily invited. The dude worked in a grocery store as a kid in PA and watched steel mill workers get off the bus from work every day filthy and exhausted. Alvarez said after seeing that he was determined to never be one of those guys getting off the bus.
Good for him and his family.
Everyone in that system gets the same thing. However they don’t make his bank so their buyout would be a lot less. Just makes me wonder why he hardly took any PTO as an employee
If his employer is anything like most I have worked for he started out with 2 weeks and probably added more throughout the years. So he used at least one week a year plus the school pays him when they have breaks. So he probably still had plenty of time off throughout the years and banked a week a year. I’m surprised they let him bank that many though.
Congrats at having most employers start at two weeks but that’s a privilege that many do not receive
Doubt he needed to... Between breaks in the school year, trips on the company dime, expense accounts, etc, I'm sure he had plenty of time off such that he didn't need to spend it. And his kids are grown and out of the house, so no need for family vacations. Use a few days here and there. I doubt he ever had to spend a few hours at the end of the week to make up for some unexpected early departures (or late arrivals). I'm not surprised that he accumulated PTO over a 31 year career...
Look I'm as commie as the next MGoBlog commenter, but if there's anyone who has actually earned such a payout due to basically building a top P5 program out of nothing as a coach and then maintaining it for another 20 years as the AD, it's that guy.
If every executive who gets a giant payday had the results Barry Alvarez did, we'd have a lot fewer socialists.
Yeah, and he only took $301,133 out of that $1 million plus check.
He did them a solid, in all reality.
As commie as the next mgoblog commenter made me lol. As in, not?
Agreed. I got a kick out of this story. Reminds me of something my father or grandfather would have done, albeit for much less compensation.
Yeah, it's the execs who get paid big money for average or poor performance that are stealing. Like him or not - and I never have - there is no Wisconsin football without Alvarez.
Without Alvarez, Wisconsin is Kansas without the consistently elite basketball program.
Don't use that word! It's bad enough that it's thrown around so willly-nilly these days - you don't need to be using it to refer to yourself and other mgobloggers! That's what they want. And I would bet your beliefs are far, far from what that word actually entails.
Lighten up, Francis.
Sa-weet!
Most private employers won't allow a carry over of vacation. The State, not so much.
If I didn't do anything last week but called it "unused vacation," d'ya think Wisconsin would throw an extra thou' my way?
Don't worry, this is legit. I've visited Madison plus when I was in the Army I took a correspondence course from UW (biology), so I'm part Badger.
Only if you stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Funny timing. I’m taking tomorrow off solely because I’ll lose the time if I don’t. Wish I could cash it in for $1M instead…
I'm sure you could sell it back to your company at your current pay rate. And I'm sure your current pay rate is higher now than when your PTO hours started accumulating. I mean, if you at the point where you're going to lose it, it's been building up for a while. Most of the 'use or lose' points are between 300-400 hrs of PTO just sitting around. It takes several years to get to that place...
Look, if his contract gave him PTO and let him carry it year-to-year, and he legitimately never used it, then he was owed the money period.
I left my last job late last year. Because of the pandemic, I hadn't taken vacation in forever, so I had 4-weeks banked. I got paid for the extra month. Obviously I didn't get anything near to what Alvarez got, but it was still a nice payout.
Agreed. I sure wish I had something like this in previous jobs, but it was never in the contract so it is what it is. The guy was the face of an entire nationally-recognized athletic department, and every decision he makes is under a microscope. I wouldn't say that alone makes him entitled to something like this, but he was in a very high pressure job compared to most of us. With additional pressure typically comes additional perks and additional $$$.
I'd be willing to bet Warde's contract with UM has a similar clause about unused PTO.
PTO is part of salary structures - it's your money, just banked away so you still get paid when you take time off. It isn't some free give-away, nor is it a "perk" for "additional pressure". If you don't use it all before you leave a company, they are obligated to write you a check for it - because it's money you've already earned.
Unlimited PTO? Where do I find this place? I'd never be at work...
Unlimited PTO is at quite a few places (including my current company) - it's grown a lot in terms of an offered benefit in the last 5 years.
There is potential for employee abuse, but I do think it generally works for employee and employer. Most HR departments who have it say that it saves the company money in the long run. The company isn't writing out those checks for unused PTO when folks depart.
Pretty sweet deal, if you ask me. Can't say I or too many people I know have ever worked at a place where you get written a check for all your unused PTO at the end of your employment.
Granted, my current and last stop are companies that give unlimited PTO so I wouldn't be eligible for something like that anyway, but my first job out of school very much had a "use it or lose it" policy towards its PTO. You'd better use it by December 31st or its gone, and then we always had blackout periods during busy season where you were allowed to take maybe one day off over the course of two months, and it had better have been a very, very good excuse. Luckily I've always had very good, understanding managers who never gave me any passive aggressive flak about taking time when I needed.
Looks like some folks in this thread can't say the same thing.
As he should PTO shouldn’t be capped and should carry a cash value. It should be mandatory in the US for all employees. If they did the initial shut down would have been as severe as they could have forced employees to take their PTO during April/May 2020 and still earn a paycheck. But nooooo the cheapest source of labor wins.
In NC, They take PTO $$ out of your paycheck and hold it. Any PTO I get back when I retire is money I should have had in my bank account that the state got to hold on to (and earn interest) that I will be then getting back.
Dude deserves that and much more. Take him away from Wisconsin and you have Minnesota. Also if they want to save that and more just hire an extremely over paid coach at around 8 million and cut his salary in half. We call it the Michigan difference!