According to a recently released state Legislative Audit Bureau report, 77 percent of University of Wisconsin System faculty did not take a single day of sick leave during the entire year of 2005. With all of those unused days, UW System retirees can, and do, cash in upon retirement by using those leftover sick days to pay health insurance costs. According to the audit, those who retired in 2005 converted an average of $222,000 to be used for future premiums.

The benefit is indeed a good one for UW faculty, one that could influence a decision to remain at UW despite relatively noncompetitive salaries, but the conditions for reporting sick leave make the policy problematic. Under current guidelines, a faculty member who misses a day of classes due to illness is not required to report a sick day if he can find a colleague to cover his lectures, thus allowing him to accrue a massive amount of unused sick pay.

This sort of pass is not tolerated in the private sector, and there is no reason it should be acceptable for UW System employees, either.

If a recent UW Board of Regents recommendation is adopted, all UW faculty members will be required to report sick time in all cases, even if a replacement is secured for the day. While some critics claim the change in policy would discourage professors from finding substitutes to cover their classes on sick days, a missed day of work is a missed day of work, and a professor's decision to find a replacement for the day — something many professors would do with or without the reporting benefit — does not change that.

The regent committee's proposed policy change is a commonsense way to cure the current sick-leave loophole, and we encourage the full board to adopt the recommendation.