USA Resignation - Changing the last day at a company [closed]

Question

I worked many years, mostly remotely from California/CA, USA, for a company which has offices in many cities of USA including the region where I lived. But, the company recently started discouraging remote work for new employees. So, I had to resign because I moved to Washington/WA state in December 2019. The company would not allow me to work remotely from WA because they don't have offices there and they'd like employees to live near office whether remote or not. This does not make sense.

So, I gave a resignation notice of about 2 months. As far as I remember, I can quit at will and I don't need to give the standard 2 week notice. The company asked me to put a last date in early January, 2020 in my resignation email. They stated that I might be eligible for the bonus if I do that. But I strongly doubt it.

I have a large accrued vacation of almost 1 month, thanks to California laws. Per company policy, I will lose all my vacation in 2020 if I am classified as a non-CA employee. Hence, the vacation payout will be zero. If I leave in 2019 instead, then the rules are different and my vacation payout will be less than a month which is better than zero.

I am in the middle of giving KT to an employee of the company who was added to our team well before I gave notice. So, its unlikely that my manager will approve any vacation requests now. Manager approval is mandatory.

The problem is that employees in my company cannot see which USA state they have been assigned to in our HR website. Only the HR and managers can see it. So, we can see our mailing and home address in the HR website, but we cannot see the state that we are assigned to. Moreover, employees do not get a notification when their assigned state is changed. Currently I am assigned CA, but HR informed me that it is up to the manager to assign me a state in this situation. I mentioned the loss of vacation payout to my manager and she said she will get in touch with HR to do the best for me. The HR confirmed that she had reached out, but they did not tell me what exactly she said to HR. I guess it is considered confidential.

Hence, I am concerned that my assigned state could be changed later without my knowledge and I would lose all my vacation payout. All that hard work with low vacation will go waste. Given the frequent layoffs in our company and other things, it is likely that the worst will happen and I will only learn about it when it is too late.

My question is that can I and should I amend my resignation and move my last date into Dec 2019 instead of Jan 2020 ? Do I need to mention this in the amendment ?

PS - I do not trust the manager or the company to do the fair thing in these circumstances, despite all the good work I have done and great performance reviews I have received over the years.

Answer 1

This is a point of negotiation. Convey to your boss today in writing,

“I am very concerned I’m going to lose my vacation payout. Please tell me in writing I will be classified as a CA employee at the end of my notice or I will be forced to move my last day up into 2019. I really want to finish knowledge transfer and help the company through the transition but I won’t risk losing a large amount of earned compensation in the process. Thanks.”

If there is no good answer by Monday then send the same thing to HR cc’ing your manager. Then if there is no good answer by Monday after, move your last day up to Dec 31.