As a German I find the concept of “allotted sick days” disturbing.
What if I told you that it usually also takes away from your vacation days?
So if you get sick too often, no vacation for you that year.
That’s sick (pun intended). Over here it’s the other way around: When we get sick during a vacation, we get the vacation days back.
Take your civilised attitude and get out of here!
Although, at least in my field of work, it’s a bit frowned upon to actually get your vacation days back when you get sick.
It really shouldn’t. My company has reprimanded people for not responding their vacation days. The law is very clear on this and courts have stated as well: vacations are meant for recovering your energy. Healing from an illness does not allow you to recover from work, so you must be granted that time again.
Only a refreshed worker is a productive worker.
That’s not the case in the UK, your annual leave is a legal entitlement, and unrelated to any sick time you may have to take.
The workers of your nation need to organise a few general strikes to get their basic rights sorted out, I don’t like seeing workers abused.
My sick days and PTO are the same. I have a chronic illness I’m working with doctors to treat. Between occasional sick days, and doctors visits, I never get a vacation day
That really sucks. I’ve never had a job where they separated PTO and sick days. They just pool them together.
Damn, the US needs to get their shit together
How inconsiderate of you, think of the billionaires who would suffer!
I’ve worked at companies that do both. There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
The worst of all is so called unlimited PTO.
There are pros and cons to each. Sick days are usually not paid out if your employment ends. But if you just have PTO, that would be paid out.
I get why you consider “getting more money” a pro, but in my book any financial incentive to avoid taking a sick day when you are actually sick and instead try to power through and infect everyone in the office should be considered as con.
What if I told you merging PTO with sick days was to get around the Federal requirement for employers to not use your use of sick days against you. By eliminating sick days and rolling them all into one pool, they now can use being sick as an excuse to fire you.
Yeah WTF, what if you get sick again? Do you tell the flu to sit it out or prepetuate the epidemic?
Believe it out not, straight to jail.
I was always told to never call in sick. If you’re sick, you go to work and only if the manager says to go home should you leave work.
Shit that doesn’t even save you at some places. I was working and started feeling shitty ended up having a 103° fever, and was sent home. It still counted as an absence against me during my review.
So compare that with my experience of a few years ago when one of my relatives had an accident, and I was the one who could care for them for a few weeks.
Their conversation with their boss:
- Hey boss, I had an accident, I’ll be out of work for a bit.
- Oh, what happened?
- Look, I would rather not talk about it.
- When are you coming back?
- It will most likely be a month.
- Okay, see you in a month then.My conversation:
- Hey HR person, I need two weeks of care leave to care for a relative.
- Okay, see you in two weeks!And that was all that’s legally required of us, and legally permitted to the employers. We were both fully paid for the leave, as both employers were insured for exactly this. And the sky hasn’t fallen, and the GDP is up, and we still live in a prosperous first world country.
Again, WTF?
You get everyone else sick, like Supply Side Jesus intended!
wait until you see this documentary they made a few years ago, called “Breaking Bad”.
I had a coworker whose kids got sick back to back and then his wife, and then he got ill too. By March, he had no PTO and had to cancel his vacation that summer. He was worn the fuck out come summer. I think he was able to flex to work “four tens” here and there, but it sucks that “sick” and “vacation” are not only the same bucket, but could get you punished.
As a European I can’t grasp this concept. As if sickness is something somebody chooses by will.
No, sickness is not a choice, but staying at home to recover IS a choice.
Just came in to work, projectile vomited everywhere then passed out on the floor. Bonus if you could pull off a seizure.
It’s only professional ethics to bring whatever bug you have and share it with colleagues.
Sharing is caring.
Wait I thought sharing is communist—
(promptly gets blasted with a cloud of water droplets carrying some rhinovirus)
In this situaution, wouldn’t you be worried about incurring medical costs if someone called for help?
Which also is NOT a worry in Europe. In some countries the worst that can happen if you ask for an ambulance that was completely a waste of time is getting fined about 30 euros. Worst outcome I had from visiting A&E was to have to pay for the prescribed antibiotics.
cries in working parent
My employer gives us 8 sick days a year. When we run out of those we are supposed to use vacation time. It’s downright depressing how fast we blow through the sick time in a bad winter season.
I’m very very lucky to work from home, so I can neglect my sick kid at home while getting work done and thus avoid having to burn through my vacation time as well. Others aren’t so lucky.
This is pretty much illegal in most European countries btw. But not all countries assure sick children time off.
I finally have a job that has good benefits, after only having contract work and unpaid internships in the past. I have unlimited pto and unlimited sick days.
I am too scared to use them because I don’t want to accidentally use too much.
I’m so glad for the German worker’s rights. I practically can’t be fired for being sick.
That’s not true. The hurdles are high but you can get fired for sickness.
That’s what “practically” implies. It’s possible, but firing someone in a legal way is really really hard. Most fired employees just take the hint, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal to fire them.
You’re right, I took the meaning of “practically” too literal (as in only theoretically possible).
It’s true, you can just call your doctor in Germany and get your employer notified and they have to accept. You don’t even have to be sick. It’s getting dangeous once you accumulate more than 6 weeks of sick days but even then there are still hurdles for the employer before they can fire you.
It’s getting dangeous once you accumulate more than 6 weeks of sick days
No, it just means the health insurance starts paying your salary, and you’ll get less money. But for your employer it’s actually better, because they don’t have to pay you anymore.
That’s only true for 6 consecutive weeks of sickness.
One of the prerequisites to fire someone for sickness is that they are sick “often” and there’s no improvement to be expected. That’s a soft limit but if you’re sick for 6 accumulated weeks for a number of consecutive years, that box is pretty clearly checked because it’s twice the average of sick days in Germany.
In fact you can’t be fired at all (in the sense of "leave immediately and we won’t pay you anymore“) unless you really fuck up (like, assault your superior or something along those lines).
Is this one of those comics where you have to laugh otherwise you’d cry because it’s so true?
But that doesn’t make sense even in capitalist mindset. Finding another specialist is going to take time and resources. Plus, this is apparently a very good employee, already tested. The new one will likely be not as good if this one is perfect.
I understand that this comic is a hyperbole, but seems like firing people over using their sick leave is financially detrimental.
It doesn’t make sense but it happens constantly, especially in low-level environments Where Heads Are a dime a dozen, it’s usually not straight out being terminated however it’s done in the case of yeah you did everything perfectly but we can’t financially afford to give you a higher rating than average. Which does more or less the same thing cuz it tells the employee well it’s time to go elsewhere so they’re going to be doing training costs anyway
Yeah, but the new guy’s gonna be cheaper than the one with experience!
I mean, think about the next quarter benefits! Stop searching for stuff like ‘reliability’ or ‘long term’. That doesn’t mean anything to the shareholders who’ll jump ship the next month.
(It’s definitely an hyperbole, but it does raise a good point over hyper short-termism leading to mass layoffs for ‘profitability’. The sick days are just the excuse needed to part the employes that will support their hyper toxic management structures from the ones who aren’t ‘team players’)
Onboarding a new employee is incredibly expensive. I think the stat is that it takes on average 6 months for the company to break even for the hiring costs. That’s what I’ve read through. No idea how true it is
It’s very true!
Six months is the most conservative estimate I’ve heard. There’s some specialties where it’s closer to 24 months.
But the boss’ bonus will have arrived in their account, before then. And with a little luck, the next company wide reorganization will make it someone else’s problem.
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