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 mean… i would like to go to europe, but where on earth do i find the time off work and the money to do it?
that americans are not better traveled is not entirely the fault of their attitudes. it’s easier for your average european to travel internationally for a number if reasons, both practical and systemic.
edit - for many americans, international travel is a privilege.
You’re right, it is a great privilege. I’ve never left the U.S. either. But I’m also not a fucking dumbass MURICAMAN that thinks a $5000 bill for a broken arm and 3 sick days a year is something to be grateful for.
I’m able to see that my country is super fucked up and that mlst of Europe seem to do most things better.
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.
do you actually believe this or are you just trolling
Its pretty hyperbolic, but I know people that aren’t far from thinking this way.
No, we have worker’s rights – not enough, but you do have rights. Federal and state labor law covers a surprisingly broad number of topics.
Shitty employers want you to think you don’t have rights, because they want to continue to illegally exploit you.
Look up what you could have and tell me if it actually compares.
Like to have some more of those rights? Consider joining a union.
This is because, so far, it’s up to the state’s to regulate, if they even do.
Ex: in Colorado, the minimum PTO is 48 hours per year.
This is an American misapprehension. Even in your most worker friendly states you have extremely sub-par workers rights for a first world country.
But it’s also a misunderstanding of how the US is governed and regulated. It’s setup more like Europe than people realize.
And yes, we’re fully aware of how much most of us are getting screwed on worker’s rights for time off. People in other countries don’t think we’re aware but we are. The question becomes, how do you fight for more rights? Our politicians absolutely suck. That’s the main issue. The two party system doesn’t work but we can’t agree what to do about it.
Strike, fight, bleed, die.
We have ours because us and our ancestors already fought and died against our oppressors to get them.
You have two choices, die for your overlords, or die for your rights.
That is fucking insane. The burden for everyone who gets sincerely sick and is horrible fucked. Its just sad.
My last job had no sick days. I would get no pay for the day and a point, and at 6 points you’re gone.
The job I have now ALSO has no sick days, but at least the attendance policy is so lax I can literally skip 2/3 shifts and stay employed. Still no pay, but it’s a bit less shitty than my last job.
The bar is so fucking low I don’t think ground penetrating radar could find it.
Might be worth checking the flowchart to see if you’re eligible for FMLA leave. If you are and they’re denying you sick leave The Department of Labor would love to hear about it – they don’t screw around.
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I work in Spain, we don’t have sick days. If the doctor says we are not apt to work, we take a leave intil the doctor says so. Indefinitely. No maximum. As long as the doctor says.
This limit thing is so weird. Yeah, you can use them as vacation of you are healthy but that’s an abuse and then when you need them you will be vulnerable without days. It’s better to have infinite days, to be used only when you are actually sick, as stated by your doctor.
Indefinitely. No maximum. As long as the doctor says
I work in Spain, happen to be on sick leave/disability, and that’s not exactly correct:
- The doctor can only authorize 365 days of paid sick leave
- After that, you get back to your company’s health insurer (“mutua”) who has 180 days of paid sick leave to either:
- Treat you until you’re healed (or claim you’re healed) and put you back to work (if you refuse, you get fired)
- Grant you permanent disability
If the insurer decides that you’re healed, you can’t go back onto a sick leave for the same reason for… I think it’s 6 months.
Right right, if your leave is longer than a year the permanent inability (incapacidad permanente, diferente a una discapacidad) cards pop up, since chances are you will never be able to be able to return to the same work you did, like an ernia for a driver and so on.
In any case, people taking a year long leave is kind of rare and it’s practically limitless compared to the 2-30 days the other mentioned countries get.
Good luck with your situation.
(edit - i live in the us) i can purchase extra insurance for short-term and for long-term sick leave.
right now, i have ten days of paid time off for whatever reason per year (no explicit sick leave) and i pay about $650 a month for insurance which covers very little for myself and my kids until i have spent at least $6000 on any one of us or $15000 for all of us together. i make about $50k a year before tax and insurance.
and our compensation package (paid time off and insurance) is considered pretty good for my area.
i could buy better insurance and short and long term leave, but this would cost about half of what i make. unfortunately, half of what i make already goes to rent.
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.
See? But that’s the thought process that I find baffling. Because I can’t find an American who doesn’t claim to be dissatisfied, so… how do you land in that mix of conformism, where you don’t think you can take political action of any sort to address it, but also extremism, where you think the logical endgame is full on armed conflict?
How do you massage a whole continent-sized country’s psyche into just sitting there and taking it right up until the point where you start shooting people? I’m not even French and even I can see the glaring hole full of mass protesting right in the middle of that crap.
And hey, not to spoil any big secrets, but the US is literally the only democracy that hasn’t rewritten its constitution fundamentally since its creation. You guys know that’s allowed, right? Go argue for a proportional system or a parliamentary system or something. I mean, you guys could try doing something at all before deciding that it’s full-on purge time.
Because if we try to change anything, we run the (very high) risk of losing our jobs, then our homes, and ending up on the streets. If you have a way to get over 300 million people all on the same page for a general strike, who are all willing to risk losing their income, please let me know.
I don’t think this really addresses the question. Revolution provides even more of an economic disruption?
Keep in mind the OP is not an American. They don’t have the context.
I mean… as the other guy says below, if you’re considering revolution surely a general strike is a notch below that level of commitment.
But also, I’ve lived through multiple general strikes. I don’t know what to tell you, a party and a bunch of unions called for them, people followed them at will. Some changed stuff, others didn’t. Nobody lost their jobs or homes, among other things because it’s illegal to retalliate against a strike. Because, you know, we had strikes about that.
We’re not even a particularly old democracy, we were an outright fascist country less than a century ago. My dad remembers running away from fascist police when he was in college. I don’t know what to tell you.
Part of the problem for major reforms is that large areas of empty land have more power than the will of the people to get things through the Senate.
We are protesting. So far we’ve been at best ignored, and at worst…
You’ve probably seen what our police are like.
I’m American and it’s never made much sense to me, either.
Afaik it’s fundementally 5 forces.
- Severe distrust of the established institutions, including the democratic process.
- Long-drawn, multi-generational unrest ever since late globalization and the decline of unions.
- Anti-labor propaganda and institutional complacency.
- Increased alienation and in-fighting among the population. Got much worse ever since the MAGA repubs cropped up. We’re fighting against 40-50% of the population for basic shit. (Have you seen our paralyzed congress?)
Finally, this unwillingness to be the first to bite the bullet. Inevitably, the first people to start off these grassroots movements are going to get the shortest end of the stick. They are people sacrificing their free time and economic security for a movement that begs others to do the same.
It’s a massive risk.
FWIW, I do recognize all of those from the outside looking in.
I also recognize that you have so few protections that action is riskier than it is here, where protesting can’t be legally retaliated against and there are actual labor protections in place that make effecting change easier. Which in turn is part of the expectation that the government should proactively help you when you need it.
But still, it does seem like there should be a middle point somewhere where you get rid at least of point one and you tip over point three, right? That seems like it’d happen way before stuff gets really violent.
But then, culturally you guys fantasize about violently confronting the government since day one, which I guess is what happens when your foundational myth is also a colonial-revolutionary myth.
It is pretty messed up, though.
Then we aren’t getting it because you no money deserve anything once you’re a terrorist. We need to do something constructive, not kill people.
Historically speaking, the most successful leaps forward have come about via methods that were branded as “terrorism” while they were happening. If we had restricted ourselves exclusively to what you call “constructive”, we would have never freed ourselves from the shackles of monarchy, or in the case of the American Civil War, the much more literal shackles of, well, shackles. Violence should be a last resort, but keeping off the table entirely is just naive.
Now, this? This is a crucial difference. As I was saying before, the foundational revolultionary myth of the US is a lot, and it sure looks like it sets the stage.
I mean, that statement is absurd on the face of it, seeing how… you know, the UK exists and it’s ostensibly a democracy (a social democracy, even, by some definitions) and so are all the other colonial powers and a lot of the independent colonies, major liberal revolution or not.
It makes no sense, but you still said it as a fact. It’s still bipartisan enough that you didn’t picture it in your head as a bit of conservative historical fantasy mythmaking, you put it out there as a verifiable thing you can just say. The opposite notion is naive, even.
That must leave a mark, right? The indoctrination and warped perspective of the relationship with government, progress and change that mindset must give you HAS to be a part of this.
the american population, however, is deadlocked in their opposed visions of what progress looks like, and leadership is not strong enough to do much more than continue to consolidate and protect their own power and authority.
again, change at the lower bars you have proposed is very difficult indeed, and requires shared vision that is very hard to come by here. it doesn’t help people to feel change can be obtained through current systems or non-violent strikes that a) financial constraints are so much harder to overcome than in previous decades (i.e. trying to strike could mean inability to feed or house yourself or to afford needed medical care) and b) what change we managed in recent decades has been rolled back (roe v. wade) or is under attack (civil rights).
i hate that my comment is so negative and i don’t want to discourage any fellow americans from trying to create positive change. i’m just sharing my own voice and why it’s hard to imagine success short of revolution. i feel like advocacy and voting are all i can really do right now, and they are honestly not very effective.
Did you just say the government pays regular citizens?? Where I come from that’s communism. Governments are only supposed to pay corporations like the good lord intended.
Well, no, they do. They pay your boss to pay you. Or they pay you instead of your boss. Either way your boss gets stuff, so… yay capitalism?
A common tactic for startups is to offer “unlimited days off” knowing that people won’t take days off.
Best part for them is that because you don’t have specific days to take off they don’t have to pay you for them when you quit.
because I am a big gobshite, I always mention this. They ask for feedback about benefits in most companies, I always say, “yeah you say unlimited time off but I’m not allowed to take 365 consecutive days?”
two separate companies have changed it to “flexible time off” because of my inability to keep my trap shut
I don’t know if that’s reality though. Part of my new job’s compensation package that I negotiated in was unlimited days off. I’ve already taken a vacation I wouldn’t have been able to with my previous job. I know better than to abuse the privilege but the trade off of not getting it paid out on exit is already worth it for me.
I get 5% extra per year saved of sick leave on my pension, up to 2 years, adjusted to percent of the year left of sick leave. But my job is fun and people tend to want to work.
Eh, doesn’t those depend on how often I get sick? That’s the idea, no? A doctor signs me off being unable to work?
No. If you have paid time off it is part of your compensation package. A better way to look at it is if you work 52 weeks a year and your employment includes a week of PTO, then you are effectively due 53 weeks of pay and any time you take off is subtracted from that number.
Where I work (not California) this time is “use it or lose it” so no. Our comp is 52 weeks a year and we can take up to 3 weeks (not consecutive) of that off for whatever if scheduled or unscheduled for sickness. 1 week if you are new.
Still yes. The point is that PTO is part of your compensation package. If you don’t use it you are not receiving that compensation. Put it another way: if part of your compensation package is a company vehicle (just like everyone else in the company) but you work from home, are you going to consider that fair compensation?
Yes I understand that. Just wanted to point out that most places don’t pay out unused PTO. Unless required by law.
Oh for sure, which is why it should be.
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I’d say work to your compensation, not the bare minimum. Bare minimum is what you do when you make bare minimum. But- do take all your compensation. Time or money, its yours, you earned it.
Act your wage? 😝
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I busted ass at my first two jobs and never got raises to match so I walked into my current one with a different mindset. I do only what’s asked of me and nothing more unless I think it’ll fun. When it’s not, I tell them to talk to my boss to get it on my calendar. It’s so much easier to avoid mistakes when you’re not stressed out from overwork.
It’s incredible. I wish I would have thought to do this 15 years ago.
The issue with the do the bare minimum attitude is it’ll end up hurting you more than them.
Do good work, be reliable, and take the time you’ve accrued/are given. This type of person is above average these days. Only incompetent managers have an issue with that.
Apparently the WSJ is incompetent.
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This starts in school with awards for perfect attendance
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
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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
America is something else entirely.
Send help
Have you tried pulling a little harder on your bootstraps?
Bootstraps made in USA…and broke! Reaffirming call for support.
Yeah, even the mindset that you being sick is your personal problem. If you get sick, you should be able to be away as long as you need, without being worried that you become homeless.
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”
Thanks for the clarification.
The stock market should be abolished entirely. The driving force behind big business and government decisions should be humanity, not money.
Absolutely!
Interestingly enough, I just put forth the argument in another thread that dismantling the stock market would address a lot of systemic problems. I’m glad it’s not just my own thinking.
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.”
So pandemic taught people how viruses spread
While I appreciate your optimism, you know there’s no way this is accurate
I mean, it helped teach me. It’s not that I didn’t actually understand it before, it’s that I hadn’t internalized it (and how selfish it is to go around getting other people sick). My dad is one of the “I never take a sick day!” people and when you hear that enough as a kid, the “merit” of that sticks in your bones. It took me several years as an adult to really believe that I wasn’t selfish or lazy if I took a sick day.
Did it change your dad? Just out of curiosity.
I am interested, but ultimately it’s irrelevant, because our subjective experiences don’t really hold a candle to the entire “anti mask” movement, the culture you’re describing here, and slightly different but akin to that cultural aspect, the idea of “hustling” to chase fortune.
And that’s just the philosophy of it. There’s also the millions that most certainly just don’t understand shit about germs, mechanisms of how illness spreads, etc.
Nah, unfortunately, he went in the other direction. He’s one of the ridiculous anti-mask kine people.
pandemic taught people how viruses spread
Didn’t every adult in the developed world not learn this as a child from their parents? Or failing that, at school? Are most people genuinely that stupid?
It boggles my mind that it took a world changing pandemic for people to learn basic hygiene! If people just washed their hands occasionally (start with after you go to the toilet) perhaps COVID would have never happened.
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.
This only applies to infectious disease
Or a really bad day. Like unbearable pain, or a massive head ache. It’s better if people take the time off and recover because they work better and make fewer mistakes. Nothing sucks more then to redo work.
I was talking about the fact that pain is not contagious … Of course pain is a valid reason to stay at home!
My reasoning was that the risk of spreading the disease can’t be the only reason for companies to let you not go to work because it only applies to infectious diseases!
I think the majority of people misunderstood my comment
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.
Actually we’re from one of these few countries that don’t happen to be the US.
Florida?
And how much of their workplace ended up sick because of that?
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?
…not if everyone is afraid to use sick days / lose wages / repercussions from management / yadda yadda yadda
Regardless of whether they are present or not, if their productivity is down the drain because they can’t focus or are in pain, inefficiency rises, output and profits fall.
Well, media controlled and owned by business. What do you expect? 😅
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’ve noticed anything labeled “business” or “finance” or “money” is just as ridiculous, if not more. They really are drinking each other’s piss and thinking it’s Kool-Aid.
The real fucked up part is to them it IS Kool-aid, and they know it tastes like piss to the rest of us. They don’t care.
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.
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?
In Germany, you just go to any physician and tell the receptionist, you need a day off. The vast majority don’t ask questions. And if they do, you say you got a stomach bug.
I can get into urgent care in an hour or two and my GP will have all the info when I get in to see her.
Teledoc works for a lot of it right?
We have an app to our occupational health care provider and you just basically slide a DM to a doc if you need a note (3 days or more of sick leave iirc).
I’m an older worker. I have no qualms about using all my sick days.
