the idea that sick days somehow impose a financial burden of the company is a blatant lie of criminal proportions. It is a justification for wage theft
people should use all of their sick days
Why do you even have an allocation of sick days? It's not really a concept anywhere I've worked (in the UK).
I’m in the US and I get 3 paid sick days a year. Anything more and I don’t get paid PLUS I get a point. After 8 points I lose my job. We come to work sick unless we are in the hospital.
If Americans knew what workers rights were they'd be very angry to realise they have none.
Most Americans still have their hears shoved so far up their asses that they think all of Europe is a freedomless third world region where the governments silence all criticism and doctors still use leeches or something. Just completely delusional and in denial.
Of course most Americans haven't even left their own state, never mind gone to Europe to experience it themselves.
I'm always amazed by how Americans in particular (sorry if you're not, I'm assuming) tend to go from one end of the spectrum to the other without any middle stops in common sense land. I once had a US friend go straight from "we have bad health care" to "we need a violent revolution" with no consideration to... you know, maybe good health care?
I mean, from my perspective it seems pretty obvious that you should only take as many sick days as you need, but you should take all the ones you need, to an unlimited total amount.
Like, that seems so simple. It's how it's always worked in the multiple countries I've lived in. You're sick? You call in sick. You need to be off for multiple days? You ask your doctor to officially declare that you're sick. The company is taking a hit? The government covers your wages during your long term sickness.
This works. We know this works. It's obvious this works.
We don't believe that the government will let us have good Healthcare without revolution at this point. One side violently opposes it and the other dangles it like a carrot on a stick for votes, with no intention of actually providing it because if they actually improved things somewhat they'd lose a precious bargaining chip. This song and dance has been going on for as long as I've been alive. We're losing hope here.
This starts in school with awards for perfect attendance
Really sums it up tbh. No one gets through school without needing a sick day, but they offer children a worthless piece of paper for being obedient enough to risk everyone else's health.
Dont know about other kids, but seems like I had strep throat and conjunctivitis at least twice a year. Thankfully I did NOT have perfect attendance.
Maybe its an award for children with especially strong immune systems? Cool.
Take every single day you're entitled to. The days of working yourself to death so you get a pat on the back by the boss is well over. You come first
Bro there's still so many idiots at my workplace working their life away for a stupid card that says "best performer of the month". I got no problem with that but the issue that I have is they make life hard for guys like me. I know and they know that they can't afford a shitty 4 bedroom house so why the fuck slave so hard. I really don't get it
LOL! Then don't offer it. Let's see who will work for you. Fuckers want to enslave people.
"let them die! I need my 4th yacht!" -CEO and other top-level management, any large co
Wall street is the psychotic, insatiable, dehumanizing tail that wags the dog, one petulant tantrum-a-minute to the next, and the next, and the next... perpetually.
God forbid anyone in a corporate position of power try and do anything that isn't indecent and corrosively myopic, else the stampeding Dow Jones zombies go on a goddamned short-selling rampage.
But then people have been saying this for ages now, and still here we are.
EDIT: added "insatiable"
I remember a story about a CEO who decided to pay ALL of his employees well. As I remember, all of his middle management left in a huff because they no longer had their higher earnings to hold over their subordinates and feel superior, all of his friends ostracized him and he essentially became a pariah.
Yeah, Dan Price, just went to look it up. Apparently, he had to resign after some allegations against him, which turned out to be false. Something smells off about a man paying employees fairly suddenly getting trumped-up charges that never got properly investigated before being referred to the prosecutor's office literally the day after he announces the pay stuff.
https://fortune.com/2023/04/19/gravity-payments-dan-price-assault-charges-are-dropped/
He resigned because someone that has part ownership in the company sued him.
The lawsuit was basically “you’re not acting in a way that is best for the shareholders”
Or in other words “you’re paying the employees more and me less, so I’m mad at you for treating them well”
The stock market should be abolished entirely. The driving force behind big business and government decisions should be humanity, not money.
The whole reason sick days are a thing is that giving employees paid sick time costs you less when they don't come in and make other employees sick. If enough people get sick in a given org, that has a way of really impacting everything about a workplace, it really is cheaper if they stay home until they're not contagious.
The worst part of this situation, to me: that anyone is pressing for sick leave to be tightly audited, or seeking to frame its use as a sort of graft or taking from the employer, or a pretext for preemptively firing employees deemed guilty of being too sick. This kind of talk creates pressure for employees to come to work sick in order to avoid being seen as slackers or thieves, and that in turn (especially in an environment full of flu and covid variants, doubly so on the heels of a fucking pandemic so we should all know better by now) defeats the point of having sick days in the first place.
The whole reason sick days are a thing
Sick days are a thing because unions fought for them.
From the article
Prepandemic, Fleetcor workers in their 20s and 30s took one or two sick days a year, she says. Now, it's more like three to five.
So pandemic taught people how viruses spread and how not to spread them and coming to work sick is shameful, not a badge of honor. Still, 4 days a year isn't enough.
I worked with a guy, Clint, who had been at the company his whole life, worked his way from the factory floor to head of accounting. The thing Clint chose to brag regularly about was that he was 60-something and had never taken a sick day. Instead, he'd roll in obviously sick, sneeze on everyone, everyone he saw that day would get sick, a few of them followed his stellar example and got more people sick. During those times, no actual work got done except Clint lamenting about how everyone was getting sick. "Must be the weather."
I know this couple who contracted COVID during the pandemic but refused to report it and take sick days. He - because his workplace was offering bonuses for employees who weren't taking sick days (don't remember if it was monthly or annually) and he didn't want to miss on that. She - because she already took all her sick days as PTO, without actually being sick.
I can't help but wonder if that's really what sick days are supposed to be...
Perhaps Americans need to learn to call them wellness days and not place some arbitrarily low limit for amount of days on them. Ten or twelve to start a year seems reasonable. Americans are bizarre.
He - because his workplace was offering bonuses for employees who weren't taking sick days
Good god is that illegal in Europe. Employees are entitled to sick pay if they're sick, if no reason other than to ensure they don't come into the office and get everyone else ill as well. Also employees are actually required to take holiday pay, last year I got called into a meeting and got told I had to take more holidays because I wasn't taking enough.
She - because she already took all her sick days as PTO, without actually being sick.
Again illegal in Europe, PTO and sick pay are independent of each other. There's no limit on the number of sick days you can have, although if you go beyond a certain number you do require a doctor's note, but as long as you have that you're golden. In theory this is abusable, but because everyone gets PTO anyway, and actually get a decent number of days, there isn't really the incentive to do that.
It's bizarre the way the United States operates.
Employees are entitled to sick pay if they're sick, if no reason other than to ensure they don't come into the office and get everyone else ill as well.
Two jobs ago (in the States) my employer was extremely stingy with any paid time away from work.
I got six days. Total. (Not counting holidays.)
Six days for any and all purposes that one might need to not be in the office.
They even had the gall to say they offered sick days, "because you can use your PTO to stay home when you're sick".
Fuck that.
I came to work no matter how sick I was. I knew exactly how much I made in a day, and as soon as my boss or anyone else would complain about how I shouldn't be there, I'd ask them if they were willing to pay me my daily wage to go home. Because I only got six days, so fuck me if I was going to use any of them for anything other than my own enjoyment. If I was sick, I was miserable and less productive anyway, might as well get paid for that, and not burn any of my precious PTO.
On one occasion, I was so sick my boss actually agreed to send me home and pay the rest of my day without taking PTO...but of course the stingy bastard couldn't just give people more sick days.
Typical "back in my day" garbage. Why would you even want people to come in and spread their sickness? Wouldn't that cause even more lost production time?
Well, media controlled and owned by business. What do you expect? 😅
People shouldn’t have to work sick. If we learned one thing from Covid, shut spreads around the office.
If someone is slightly ill let them work from home or take a day off.
Why do we even hold up the charade of calling WSJ by name when it's obviously just fox news (in ownership and content) with the lightest of filters for outright insanity?
I’m baffled that people are able to see their doctor quickly enough to get a note for proof that they were sick and need time off.
Where are these easily accessible doctors?
The boot has now been completely incorporated in the throat.
I’m an older worker. I have no qualms about using all my sick days.
American here. Have unlimited PTO. It’s definitely not the norm but it does exist. I came from a company with only 2 weeks paid time off (total).
Unfortunately a simple "unlimited PTO" policy is fake pro-employee policy.
It plays out in a way that actually ends up harming the employee.
Every "unlimited PTO" policy should be combined with a minimum PTO policy. If you're wondering if a company actually cares about its employees' mental health, that's how you know.
I’ve worked at a few places with “unlimited PTO” and I totally agree.
It sounds great in practice: “as long as your work is getting done, take as much PTO as you want!” In reality, it never works out that way because there’s never a “good” time to take a vacation; if you don’t have vacation days that you have to use, you won’t use them.
My work recently changed their policy, we get 48 hours sick time a year. If you use it it's counted as an occurrence against you. Three occurrences in a rolling year and you're put on disciplinary action.
Here's your new benefit ...but you better not use it.
You can't make shit like that up.
I hated that article. I don't need all of the charged language or opinion. Here'sthe WSJ article if y'all want to read it of note, the WSJ isn't really making a determination here. Mostly just quoting out of touch executives and labor firms.
I'm all for work reform but how this comes back on the Wall Street Journal is beyond me.
Cool pro-tip that sometimes works to get around the WSJ paywall, especially if you use DDG. Search for the title of the WSJ article and put “msn” after.
It will sometimes send you to Bing’s google Amp-like (ugh, I know) MSN news site where there is no paywall.
Yeah, well fuck them. I used up my one week's worth of sick days and all of my PTO and am now on FMLA because I'm dealing with an illness that is causing me to miss work. What the fuck am I supposed to do? They told me to go on FMLA.
Know the laws for your state. Most of the states in the union are fucked, but some at least have something on the books.
https://www.patriotsoftware.com/blog/payroll/state-mandated-paid-sick-leave-laws/
Also, remember that paid sick leave is different from paid vacation. In many states, unused paid vacation must be paid upon termination, many times regardless of the reason for the termination. Unfortunately, my state is absolute trash and does not provide any protections for workers' rights or hold employers accountable for a damn thing. Hope this helps someone else though.
https://ask.legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.info/cc-nto-vacation-rolling-pl
Great article in terms of calling out the sentiment, but their analysis is really dumb.
Just to be clear: the idea that sick days somehow impose a financial burden of the company is a blatant lie of criminal proportions. It is a justification for wage theft — the most common and most costly form of burglary in America. Sick days are part of an employees' compensation package; therefore, sick days are just another form of money owed to the workers. If a company is spending the money that it legally and contractually owes to a worker
Not only is this not accurate whatsoever, as companies are not required to pay you for unused sick time (thus making it not wage theft - also it isn't wage theft to complain - but the money isn't contractually owed at all).
What makes this truly bad though is that employers that do pay out for unused sick time see way fewer incidences of "sick time as general PTO," and workers actually get their full comp, and should be a standard across all employers. They literally skip over the thing that would be better for workers and employers, in their analysis.
If a worker wants to trade pay for time off, that should be their right. They should also be paid for the time off they don't take, as it is indeed factored into employee comp on the corporate level.
What kind of company doesn't insure against sickness of their employees? When I mentioned I was sick a lot, my boss at the time laughed and told me the company gets an insurance payment if I'm out, so not to worry. Fyi, I'm in Europe.
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