The one issue here is that in many industries, the use of "vacation days" is, per the labor contract, required to be scheduled in advance. Often quite some time in advance. Which makes use of "vacation days" for unexpected illnesses (went to bed last night and felt fine, woke up this morning to fever and chills) difficult to impossible if the requirement for "advance scheduling" is actually enforced.

In many jobs with separate vacation and sick days, the vacation days still require the "advance notice" for scheduling, but the sick days do not require that one know, days in advance, of an unexpected illness. That gives the employee a few days that can be used for unexpected things, and the employer some assurance that a maximum of X days of unexpected outages will occur per employee.

More often than not, the "only one type of paid leave" comes attached with the "requirement for advance scheduling" of those same days, which does not provide for the unexpected illness situations.

I agree. My employers over the last couple of decades have just had a general PTO amount. But for that to work, two other things have to go with it: the PTO amount has to be enough time to cover both uses, and there still has to be a mechanism that allows for unplanned time off.

The true cruelty of "no sick days" isn't that employees have to burn vacation days, it's that vacation days have to be scheduled in advance and approved. Neither of those things leave room for sudden illness or injury, and prioritizes company schedule needs over things like scheduling doctor's visits.

Seems fine in theory, but the types of leave are different. Vacation can be anticipated and scheduled but sick days cannot. If you mandate a certain number of paid days off, you still need to require that some percentage of those days can be taken with no notice. In other words, you're still making the distinction between sick days and vacation days, you're just not using those labels, which seems unnecessarily confusing.

Wouldn't that create an incentive to run your employees so hard they develop health issues? No skin off your back, just get a new employee when the first gets permanently broken. I'm cheeky, but I think that is one of the rationales for having sick leave at all.

The one thing about this that sucks is that if you have a chronic illness, you end up using all your PTO as sick and you get no actual breaks. (Whereas if you run out of sick days you can use FMLA or short term disability without giving up all of your vacation or holidays).

Technically they have PTO, but it has to be scheduled, and may not be approved, a month in advance. Which is unworkable for almost anything.