TikTok tells staff in LA fires to use their personal/sick time if they can't work from home

Despite TikTok’s Los Angeles office being closed due to power outages as a result of the massive wildfires devastating the area, the social media site told employees to either work from home or use their personal/sick days even though nearly 180,000 residents have been forced to flee their homes.

Currently, TikTok’s Culver-City office isn’t under mandatory evacuation orders yet, but the Palisades Fire is “close enough to TikTok’s office that smoke can be seen out the windows,” Sarah Perez for Tech Crunch reports. Employees, on the other hand, are being impacted by fires threatening their homes, windstorms, and air quality issues.

While TikTok employees are dealing with loss of power and Wi-Fi and could potentially be under evacuation orders at their homes, TikTok has told them to use their personal or sick time if they need to take days off because of the impact of the fires engulfing Southern California.

The tech company’s leadership told the LA-based staff that the office would be closed from January 8-12 because the office lost power due to the fires that have already destroyed more than 5,000 structures and led to the deaths of five people. TikTok decided to make the days the office is closed for “Work From Home Days” instead of giving employees the days off unless an individual team leader decided to change that.

TikTok’s LA employees get 10 paid sick/personal (PSSL) days per year and 15 paid time off/vacation (PTO) days, so long as they were hired before June 2024, and are even more important now than in the past because of the company’s return-to-office policy which requires employees to come into the office to work three days per week as chosen by their team.

This means that if you are sick during one of the days you’re supposed to be in the office, you have to use one of your dick days instead of working from home, making those 10 paid PSSL days even more important. But now TikTok’s LA employees are being forced to use their personal/sick days even though the wildfires ravaging the area are the cause of their need for time off. Tech Crunch also reported that this will leave them with fewer days off if they get sick later in the year, and if they run out of PSSL hours available, employees are supposed to “either borrow from next year or use their PTO time instead.”

While making this policy clear, TikTok has also told employees to contact the Employee Assistance Program or their HR rep if they need to evacuate, with people in leadership roles within the company urging employees to make their own safety a priority.