5.20.23 – APFA ORD Base Brief – Illinois Kin Care

Saturday, May 20, 2023

Let’s talk about Illinois Kin Care. We can use half of our yearly earned sick time to care for a qualified family member – child, stepchild, spouse, domestic partner, stepparent, sibling, parent, mother/father-in-law, grandchild, or grandparent.

We accrue 54 hours of sick time per year, so we are allowed 27 paid hours toward Kin Care. Once recoded to Kin Care, it will not have an attendance point associated with it. To request a recode, your absence must have available sick time. Unpaid absences are not recoded unless you run out of sick time mid-sequence.

How do you use Kin Care?

Call in sick as you normally would for yourself. Then, email your AFSM (Attendance Manager) at [email protected] and write, ‘Please recode my SeqXYZ on date123 to Kin Care because I needed to care for a family member.” You do not need a doctor’s note or documentation. This request should be sent within 48 hours of the sick call unless there are mitigating circumstances – send the email asap.

Once the sick has been recoded, you will see an MS code on your HI1 and HI10. Any banked points used for the initial sick call should be restored after the sick call is recoded to the nonchargeable code and restored by the system.

Who keeps track of the hours you’ve used?

We are responsible for keeping track. Yes, the company can do it, but we have the tools to manage our time used. You can look at your HI10M to see how many times you have used Kin Care and you can look at your Activity Sheets in Jetnet.

Examples:

• You have 4.30 sick hours and need to use Kin Care for your 4-day, 25-hour trip. You would be pulled from the entire trip. Your 4.30 would be used. You would not accrue an attendance point and you would have 22.30 hours left to use toward Kin Care in future months.
• You are on reserve and have 4.30 hours of sick time. You need to use Kin Care for three reserve days before being assigned anything. Day one will use 4.10 of your sick time (that is the daily rate of pay in a 30-day month/3.56 in a 31-day month). Day 2 will use the remaining 20 minutes. Day 3 you have no sick time left in your bank, which means day 3 would be entirely unpaid and not qualify for a Kin Care recode. You would accrue an attendance point for this absence.
• You are a Line holder with 4.30 hours of sick time. You have two turns, each worth eight hours for which you need to call in sick. The first turn will deplete your 4.30. The second turn you will be charged an attendance point because it is entirely unpaid. It does not matter if you called off and gave an extended date range.
• You are a Line holder with 200 sick hours. You want to use Kin Care for your 22-hour 3-day. You will have five hours left of Kin Care for the remainder of the year. A few months later, you use Kin Care for a trip worth 30 hours. The 30 hours will come from your sick bank, and you are still eligible for Kin Care because you had five hours in your Kin Care bank left to use.

Click here for more information on Illinois Employee Sick Leave available on Jetnet. Feel free to reach out to us with questions.

In Solidarity,

Dray Howard
APFA ORD Base President
(630) 215-8410
[email protected]

Justin Patterson
APFA ORD Base Vice President
(509) 720-0067
[email protected]