Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they do not understand the relevance of the median in this. They just take the average and think it is "good enough"...
To be fair, the median is just as little information as the mean. We live in a world where ink is cheap, they should just show a histogram.
Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
51–60 of 107 posts
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#52Disclaimer: I'm a US Citizen / Worker, white collar. 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…
>The lack of trust shown there is massive. All systems based on trust eventually get abused. Not by everyone of course, but catching a few with their hands in the cookie jar is enough to trigger a rethink on the whole trust-based thing. Most corporate German workers I knew were taking a few extra vacation days a year as sick leave, or using fake sick leave(often weeks or months!) as revenge if their employer didn't g…
And I'm not advocating for no limits with no responsibility to the employer. That'd be stupid. Clearly there's a "more sane" middle ground.
Even on a menial job, they are dealing with more value than they make daily, by definition.
A middle road exists, and it is solid, why it isn't being taken, I don't know.
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#53Yeah, 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"
Okay, let's consider what laws like this (the existing one) do.
In the US most employers don't care if you take a normal number of sick days, don't require a doctor's note, regardless of whether the law allows them to. Sick days are like vacation days, it's your own business how you use them. This is fine. And if you want to make a major long-term disability claim then you'll be expected to prove it, but that seems overall pretty reasonable?
That's the common case. No major incentive for employers to cause friction with workers who are mostly acting in good faith. Then there are employers who are, let's say, less selective about their employees, will hire anyone willing to do the job, but correspondingly then see a high rate of fraud. These employers want to be able to demand evidence all the time because the sort of people they're willing to hire would be taking three months of paid vacation a year as sick days if they could get away with it.
Since the law applies to everyone, what does a law like that do? In the common case it does nothing because the employer doesn't do it regardless. In the high fraud cause it prevents something good and increases actual fraud.
So the only time it does something good is the uncommon edge case on the other side where the employer requires that even though their employees mostly weren't faking sick days. And because most employers for that type of work don't do that, those employers don't get any major benefit from it anyway and employees don't like it, the ones who do are at a competitive disadvantage, so it stays uncommon.
Which means the main effect of the law is to cause problems for the employers willing to do "second chance" hiring of people who might screw them over, which harms not only the employer but also those workers when employers stop being willing to hire them because the law requires them to take the hit if they do.
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#54I'm Norwegian. I have not taken a single day of sick leave (M51). I believe that if I get sick, it is my fault and responsibility, and I should not burden the employer or public sector with that. In 2009 i fell off a bike and hurt a knee. My fault. So I took 5 days of my vacation to stay home.
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#55"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.
People who call in sick by phone aren't sick
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#56Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#57Belgium 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…
The need for a doctor's notes means one of:
* I explain to my employer, probably don't get paid for those days, and might face disciplinary action or eventually get fired
* I go to the doctor, making my recovery less likely, increasing my stress levels which are already high due to my body fighting an infection, and risk infecting others or worse, catch something else myself for being made to cohabit space with other sick individuals
* I work even though I'm sick. If I do that from the office, I risk contaminating colleagues - and other people I interact with
There's no winning.
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#58I find it quite concerning and clickbaity that this reason is also included but comes relative late in the article:
One major reason for the rise in sick leave is better reporting, IGES wrote in its report published in January.
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#59Yeah, 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"
I probably get there, but I have young kids. 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.
Oh, yeah, I know. One of our top (young! sad!) people in .nl has been intermittently-working for, like, months now due to that, unfortunately. But... that doesn't count as "sick leave"! Because, it's, like entirely foreseeable!
What is happening is that they, through the medical consultancy working for the employer (i.e. "us"), submit their proposed working schedule a few weeks in advance. This will have several 'non-work' days (around chemo), some 'partial-work' days, and so on, basically with hourly granularity.
"We" then plan and account accordingly: "we" pay for a few hours, insurance for a few, national-level insurance for a lot, but all "we" see is a plan for actual working time.
Conflating any of that with "oh, you can just stay home whenever you want" is sick and wrong, like so much of the discussion here around "Europe." I mean, you get eviscerated for wrongly naming a Chicago suburb, but blanket statements about an entire continent are de rigeur
Re: Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
#60Yeah, 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, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete" Okay, let's consider what laws like this (the existing one) do. In the US most employers don't care if you take a normal number of sick days, don't require a doctor's note, regardless of whether the law allows them to. Sick days are like vacation days, it's your own business how you use them. This is fine. And if you want to make…
In .nl (and .pl also, although I'm less familiar with actual practices there, just because we haven't had anyone sick there in the last decade or so) there is no "normal number of sick days", and a "doctor's note" is also entirely unheard of.
If you cannot work for medical reasons, you report this to your employer, which will then (in most cases) hand off things entirely to a medical consultancy working for them. Obviously, this will not be done for 4-to-8-hour absences (again, in most cases), but definitely for anything beyond that, and if an employee tries to game the system, there are safeguards for the company there as well.
The medical consultancy will establish a plan for working hours for the next month or so (depending on the severity of the condition) and submit that to the employer: they don't get any details beyond that (in fact, that would be highly illegal). Depending on the duration of employee absence, there are various levels of insurance that (may) kick in, but the main focus is to provide a (literally) workable schedule.
Oh, and if an employee gets sick while on holiday, the same scheme applies. I found that one really gets everyone nonfamiliar with "European" working culture going...