31–40 of 107 posts
Belgium law allows employers to enforce a sick note starting day 1. I joined an employer that didn't require this, and it was such a breath of fresh air. At our local doctor, the first 5 hours of his workday were comprised solely of writing notes for people to stay home. It is a waste of (recovery) time to enforce everybody to get a note starting day one. And describing the situation in the US on this to validate the…
Let me make a proposal and you tell me what you think of it. I'd say the fundamental problem is career culture, the idea that mobility is valued over reliability. What I mean by that the culture of collecting good-boy points by starting projects, building PowerPoint slides and giving the appearance of getting work done, all in order to get a promotion and jump ship to the next higher position before your sloppiness catches up with you. Someone else is left holding the bag. If people had to actually own what they shit out in the long-term things would be much different. You either fall or rise with whatever projects you start. You might be able to bullshit your way through the corporate structures for a year or two, but ten years? No, if your project is to last for ten years you better put actual effort into it, not just the bare minimum to produce Potemkin slides.
Look at Stuttgart 21[1]. The reason it has been moved to 2031 (at the very least) is not because of the grunt worker being too slow. It is systemic failure at the top. Is it incompetence or malice? I don't know, you pick which option is worse. What I do know is that it cannot be the common worker on the ground who has to pay the price for it.
"As part of Merz's proposals, from January next year, workers will no longer be able to get a sick note over the phone. They must visit a doctor in person and on the first day of illness." Can't wait to share the sbahn with feverish people or seeing a live diarrhea attack.
"As part of Merz's proposals, from January next year, workers will no longer be able to get a sick note over the phone. They must visit a doctor in person and on the first day of illness." Can't wait to share the sbahn with feverish people or seeing a live diarrhea attack.
> Can't wait to share the sbahn with feverish people or seeing a live diarrhea attack. The 2 results I see from this change in policy is: 1. People go sick to work and possibly infect other people 2. Doctors give multi day sick notes (when 1 day would have been enough) to not be bothered again the next day, resulting in people being home longer when not needed. I genuinely don't understand who looked at this policy c…
Lawmakers aren't smarter than average people. In fact, they're often more out of touch with reality despite fancier education and credentials. They just make laws based on feels to score brownie points with a certain voter base or demographic. In this case it's with retired boomers who think young workers today are too weak and dodging work to sit at home doing nothing on the taxpayer's dime because that's the impression they got from the tabloid media who portrays zoomers and immigrants as lazy and avoiding work living on welfare.
For example in Austria during Covid the government shortened supermarket opening times to so called "protect our service workers" while missing the fact that this meant that people were now doing the same volume of shopping but spread over a smaller time period of the day, which meant more crowds and less social distancing, meaning more chance of spreading the virus.
So not only were they actually NOT protecting the supermarket workers with this measure, on the contrary, but they were also actively making the spread worse through the increased crowds of shoppers. But nobody in the public understood this second order effect, and actively cheered for this measure as a sign the government care about the average worker. That's how laws are passed nowadays, cheap low-iq populism with zero though for the second order effects and externalities on others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> from one of Germany's large insurers Is this voluntary insurance? It changes meaning to the statistic to % from those that made an insurance.
I assume you mean there might be a self-selection issue with people who are voluntarily ("privately") insured, as compared to those who have the normal state-mandated ("gesetzlich") insurance? This data is from AOK which is one of the state-mandated insurers. It insures around 2M people, and my gut feeling is that they are not terribly unrepresentative of the workforce as a whole. But of course the point is, everyone…
Yeah, I have no idea how any of these figures are derived, but... I have a hard time imagining a planet where 1.8 weeks of our Polish employees and 2.7 weeks of our Dutch employees are 'lost due to sick leave' per annum. Days? Maybe. Weeks? On average? Nah... But, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete"
But yes, these are averages between 1 person having 12 weeks and 12 people with 1 week. It's most likely power law distributed, so the average will feel weird.
There are people with cancer, severe car crashes and other horrible but temporary medical conditions in this average.
What pisses me off about all this is that the there is the underlying assumption that the working class is with the lazy working class. No, the problem is efficiency and incompetence at the top levels, not at the bottom. Running faster in the wrong direction won't get us any closes to the goal. Let me make a proposal and you tell me what you think of it. I'd say the fundamental problem is career culture, the idea tha…
Yeah, I have no idea how any of these figures are derived, but... I have a hard time imagining a planet where 1.8 weeks of our Polish employees and 2.7 weeks of our Dutch employees are 'lost due to sick leave' per annum. Days? Maybe. Weeks? On average? Nah... But, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete"
It's difficult to do a back of the napkin calculation, but you can easily see how 16 colds x 3 days / 2 parents leads to 24 excess sick days for parents per kid (discounting for some overlap when multiple kids are sick) over the first few years.
[1] https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/GrippeWeb_Daten_des_...
My first job had: Unlimited sick time. Take it when you need it. No doctor's note. I think you may have needed one at the week mark. Never hit at that employer. Most employers have been limited sick, with a note at a week.
I can't imagine note on day 1. That's just... nuts. The lack of trust shown there is massive. I'm making calls on stuff far larger than my sick days. If you can't trust me on sick days, how can you trust me to do my job?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you mean there might be a self-selection issue with people who are voluntarily ("privately") insured, as compared to those who have the normal state-mandated ("gesetzlich") insurance? This data is from AOK which is one of the state-mandated insurers. It insures around 2M people, and my gut feeling is that they are not terribly unrepresentative of the workforce as a whole. But of course the point is, everyone…
AOK insured 27 million in 2021, couldn't find a more recent number.
But the numbers are still the same (it's about rates not counts), just that we can expect the 40% figure to be more accurate than with 2M.