If we work together we can stay one step ahead of the orphan crushing machine!
What, you mean like crushing orphans ourselves before anyone else has a chance to?
I was just thinking this fits right in with OCM!
Parent, forced to choose between poverty and caring for child with cancer, gets a helping hand from coworkers when their employer would just let them starve.
Their employer is the government.... our tax dollars and voting record is why this happened.
I'm sure the top military generals have unlimited sick days though (the soldiers can go fuck themselves they should be dying for the empire anyways). Same for senators and congress people who get multi-week paid holidays every year while the country's stack of pending bills and legislation get higher and higher. So it all balances out in the end!
The concept of limited sick days is still so wild for me ... if you're sick, you're sick.
There has to be some limit for the company. Let's forget a minute about big evil corporation and take a little local company that hire a new person that is needed to run the shop. If this person is absent unlimited and you don't have the funds to hire a replacement, should you just close the shop? It doesn't mean we can put an arbitrary limit on sickness but rather than at some point the company have the liberty to let you go if you can't fulfil your part of the contract anymore in the forsable future. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be a system to help the sick person recover, but maybe that's not the company's job past a certain time, and rather the role of social/health insurance.
Here in Sweden your workplace will pay 80% of your salary for the first 7 days, and then if you are still sick, you need to get a doctor's note and then the state will pay you instead.
Also if your kid is sick you can be home with 80% salary paid by the state.
this is extremely sensible and reasonable
This is what a well implemented democratic socialism gets you (The Nordic model)
Yeah, this is why in many countries, Australia included, part of parental leave is paid by the state (it's at minimum wage, which isn't super high, but much higher than other countrie), and the company isn't required to pay anything extra (but must let you take leave).
Most employers however, are much more generous than this to attract talent.
Where I've worked you'd hit a limit after a certain number of consecutive sick days and then move on the a short or long term disability package which wouldn't be at full pay but not ruinous either. I'm not sure those are usable to care for somebody else though
Employers don't understand (or want to understand) the concept of "Lawful evil", where just because someone is out of sick days doesn't mean you aren't a monster for keeping them from their cancer-stricken daughter.
"out of sick days" -- what in the name of fuck is that??
Sincerely, Europe
It's one of the many ways our corporate overlords use to keep us chained to our desks/factories.
No medical coverage by the government, you need me, The Employer, for that.
Limited time off (sick and vacation), you need to remain at your station at all times.
Bare fucking minimum wages. You cannot save so you can leave, you must remain.
What is terrifying is journalists who work at news agencies can't tell the difference between a heartwarming altruism story and a slip through the cracks dystopian horror story.
Ah yes that good news of the orphan crushing machine being down for at least one hour....
That's what I don't understand. Europe is capitalist like the US, never the less, such cruelty and greed from the employer are simply unheard of.
They had guillotines.
We need more of that shit to keep the assholes in line.
Europe didn't buy the crap sold by 'economist' witch doctors like Milton Friedman and Alan Greedspan. At least, they didn't buy it as much.
The US treats capitalism as a religious absolute. The rest of the world regards the US as a fairly extreme example of laissez-faire capitalism.
Lots of True Believers really thought that if you didn't regulate anything and just let companies become more and more powerful, somehow the world would be a better place for it.
Check out the Chicago School of Economics if you want to know what really has brought us to this point. Hugely influential and hugely misguided, but it made a lot of men very rich and powerful so it was seen as a good thing 🤦
EDIT: Apologies to Witch Doctors everywhere.
Unions are much stronger in Europe. In the US they're a lot more limited in what they can do, if a strike would be too disruptive, which is, you know, the whole fucking point of a strike, the government can just forbid it.
That conversation gave me such a headache around the rail strike.
"They need sick days and proper pay"
"I recognize that"
"that's why they're on strike"
"well if they're allowed to strike the economy shuts down"
"if they're so important they should probably get fair pay and benefits shouldn't they?"
"Well yeah"
"that's why they're on strike"
"well if they're allowed to strike the economy shuts down"
🙄
Fuck the economy. The fact that capitalist society runs on nothing but greed and the desire for infinite growth is an issue, not the economy being "bad"
Simply being able to swap sick days is such a foreign concept to me. How does that even work or make sense? I understand being allowed to take a day or several off because you are sick without having to hand in a doctor's note. So those are your sick days. YOUR sick days. The fact that you can transfer these or use them as currency is just baffling to me. I guess this is some MUH-FREEDOM joke that I'm to European for to understand because I don't get it.
I'll take a stab at explaining from my (limited) experience. US schools receive funding from many sources, but the budget is set locally (usually once a year) by administrators and approved by a locally elected school board. When administrators make the budget they have to estimate how much money to set aside to pay substitute teachers. The administrators don't know which or how many teachers will get sick so they distribute sick hours to the teaching staff evenly. You can think of sick hours kind of like getting 'shares' in the substitute fund. Now as teachers work for a district over time these sick hours continue to accrue. Basically it means teachers who have worked there for a long amount of time and haven't needed to use the hours have hundreds of 'shares' in the substitute fund. People with a lot of accrued hours can transfer them to other employees. The amount of 'shares' in the substitute fund stays the same, but the 'owners' change. Meaning the giver loses their promise of substitute coverage, but the district can continue paying for both the sick teacher's salary AND a substitute teacher to cover their classroom, AND buy those new crayons they promised. Hope that all made sense.
I'm tired, boss.
Anywhere I’ve taught, my email has been inundated with requests for sick leave sharing. Depending on where you teach, you have to pay for your sub if you run out of leave.
Some one not only forbid their time off but then allowed other people to use their time and say yup that solved the issue and that person or persons is a cunt/s
Why doesn't the employer just give them the fucking sick days
Well you can't do that cuz if you give one employee sick days for their dying child every employee with a dying child is going to want sick days and that might impact the shareholders.
"colleagues peer pressured into risking own income if being sick"
If this is a public school there is not a lot of evil and greed happening. It's just people doing their best with very meager funds and budgets they can't change without board approval. If this issue is important to you, please take a second to learn about the fiscal year 2024 appropriations and consider contacting your federal legislators here.
giving schools meagre resources is evil
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