Paid sick leave for full-time employee in DC

Question

According to the District of Columbia’s Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act, both full- and part-time employees to be paid sick and safe leave for use under certain circumstances.

I'm working as a regular full-time employee for a company, that has the only office in Washington DC.

There is an internal document in the company, that states that

In accordance with the District of Columbia’s Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act, special full-time exempt, part-time and temporary employees are eligible for up to five (5) days of paid sick leave.

...

Regular full-time employees are not eligible for paid sick days under this policy. Instead, they may take any accrued PTO for any reason, including illness.

Is it legal, or this statement is misinterpretation, and I'm also eligible for paid sick leave?

Answer 1

It looks like your PTO already met the legal qualifications for the law were met by your PTO policy prior to the law's enactment. The linked material lists the exemption for full time employees. You should have a leave balance in your pay stub (and if not, you should talk to your company's payroll department to find out your balance(s)) and can use leave that you have for sick leave (they just aren't calling it sick leave it).

Likely your leave is valid for sick or vacation leave combined or you have two pools (sick and vacation) that you can use any leave pool for sick days (typically, sick leave will be paid out on departure from the company and has no caps on banking it (if you have X amount of hours per year and don't take sick days at all, you can add that to the sick leave you get next year) so you can retire early by using the sick leave to cover the time you would have remaining to work before retirement benefits can take over. Vacation or Annual may also payout but has a cap on banking (often this bank will be the days per year value of the year. If in year one you take no vacation days, you can still have X vacation days banked in addition to year 2's days, but you need to use that same amount by the end of year two or you will lose the hours banked in year one. Basically amounts to longer Christmas Break for a lot of people).