Employee refuses to donate his PTO hours to a coworker who he barely knows: 'Amy said that not donating is really selfish'

She is not entitled to the PTO that he earned.

We've all heard stories of teachers or nurses coming together to donate their sick days or paid time off to a coworker dealing with an illness, a family loss, or another tragedy that prevents them from working. While some see this story as a testament to coworkers' selflessness, all I can think of is the company's selfishness. It's not right that we live in a world where you can lose your job because of a life-altering tragedy that you have no control over, and therefore lose your health insurance. I know that in a lot of cases, people don't lose their jobs because they have a life-threatening condition: they lose their income, having to go on leave indefinitely, and that's the point of donating PTO: PTO and sick days are paid, and once you run out of those and your emergency is still raging on, you lose your source of income. Enter the heroic coworkers donating their PTO instead of the company giving them more paid time off than they "earned." The bottom line is unaffected if the ailing employee is using time off that's already been given to other employees.

Companies don't want to put an out-of-commission employee on paid leave indefinitely, because then they'd have to do the same for all employees facing a tragedy. They don't want to have different standards for different people, so they do everything in their power to sort of help their employees while sort of trying not to get sued by them for discrimination. It's a double-edged sword.