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Corporations Hiring Hooky Hunters
No longer satisfied with your crinkled doctor's note, a growing number of corporations are hiring "Hooky Detectives." Private investigator Rick Raymond says he's staked out bowling alleys, pro football games, weddings and even funerals looking for people using sick days. From the article: "Such techniques have become permissible at a time when workers are more likely to play hooky. Kronos, a workforce productivity firm in Chelmsford, Mass., recently found that 57 percent of salaried employees take sick days when they're not sick — almost a 20 percent increase from statistics gathered between 2006 and 2008."
The only examples provided were of employees suspected of fraud while on medical leave.
I see ZERO examples of a private dick being dispatched because someone took a sick day.
The U.S. Military, which is known for working people a lot harder than most corporations, still gives 30 days a year of paid leave. No 'Sick Days'. You could not take days off and build up 60 days if you wanted to. Anything over that was just paid back to you at end of year. It was the best policy I have ever worked under.
Now you couldn't always take your leave when you wanted to, for obvious reasons, but it worked and it's good for morale.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
If any of y'all bothered to RTFA (madness, I know), you'd have found that they aren't talking about random one-off sick days. They are investigating people on long-term disability leave. Taking a sick day because your job is stressful is not the issue here, and frankly would not be worth hiring a private dick. These people are on extended periods of paid leave for what are supposed to be debilitating health issues - the whole point of being off work is because you're not in any shape to do the work. If you throw out your back, and they give you 6 months of paid leave to rest and recover, it sort-of looks bad if you start major renovations on your house the following week. It also constitutes insurance fraud, something a tad more serious than a few I.T. guys taking the day off to play Cataclysm.
Given that I know of a bunch of people who are exploiting the system right now, shafting their fellow coworkers, driving up the premiums, and of course sticking the honest ones with overtime to make up for it, well I feel no sympathy for the hypocrites and I whole-heartedly endorse these investagators. Hell, we just outed one a few months back. Not only did this person have a long history of feigning chronic pain and stress, but she was doing it twice! When she was on leave from one job, she'd work at a 2nd, and vice versa. Once the taxman is done tearing her a new one, she gets to defend herself in court against two insurance firms. Not that I like the insurance racket any, but someone needs to punish these socially defective crooks.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
For completeness you'd want GDP per capita. That does not seem to correlate much with vacation times - as you can see, most of Western Europe is on par with US, and sometimes higher.
Sounds like a modern interpretation of the iron law of wages. If your belt can be tightened, someone should tighten it for you because you owe it to your company. If you aren't getting sick, you don't need days off because you owe that time to the company, and you'd just fritter it away having babies or something which would only decrease your productivity, or relaxing which might make you care less about the company's success. Rather than give you that time or give you the money spent on these stalkers, it's in everyone's best interests if the company keeps an eye on you.
My company took the opposite stance: there is no distinction between sick and vacation days; they are all personal days. The only caveat is calling in sick on more than four different instances within a twelve month period is strongly discouraged. The wording is "grounds for termination," but I suspect that is a soft rule.
Wait a sec. You call in sick 4 times in a year and they fire you? THAT'S FUCKED UP. It may even be illegal if you can prove you were ill.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Your post reads like a 'back in my day' followed by a 'kids these days'.
You were not deprived in the least if you lived in a two-car home where your parents made you wear a sweater in the winter. None of this is uncommon today.
There are some things today that may be different than yesterday - cultural acceptance of debt is the big one, in my mind. But the ins and outs are complicated, much more so than your sour kveltching.
All that said, to go back to the point, the middle class (and the poor) really had the brown end of the stick for the past while. It turns out that the medina household income (warning: xls) has been mostly stagnent for the middle class, but rising for the rich. In adjusted 2009 dollars, incomes for the following years were
So the poor are making the same now as they did in 1979, while the rich are making almost twice as much. (The income disparity gets much worse as you look at a smaller slice of the rich). The middle, meanwhile, is making about the same they made when the berlin wall fell.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
And tossing you to the far-right camp is undeserved why, exactly?
Because I believe in a living wage for workers, and that even people who elect not to work should be given enough to survive in relative comfort.
I support the expansion of government into areas where government belongs (we could really use municipal composting where I live, and also more social workers for foster kids).
I'm for decriminalizing most things, shutting down prisons and improving their conditions, ending the military-industrial stranglehold on our government, not being in 'optional' wars, universal healthcare (with a 10% deductible) for everyone, easing restrictions on immigration to allow current 'illegal' residents to stay and get legal faster... Amongst other things.
I usually get yelled-out of the Republican blogs.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails