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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."
These corporate sociopath CEO's have enough money to hire private investigators to stalk us. They can come up with whatever excuse or have no reason at all. These investigators have the power to ruin marriages, friendships, careers.
What can we do about the Gestapo America? BTW this article should be titled "Corporations hire professional stalkers to track employees outside of the workplace."
Instead of having to police sick days, a simpler solution would be to combine sick days and vacation days into "earned time off" or similar. Let the employee use the time as they see fit, no policing required, and you probably get better morale in the deal too.
ERROR: Null
Why are we allowing employers to put us into neo-feudalism? Can't you see these employers are doing what government wants to do but can't get away with?
It still counts as a sick day if you're taking the day off for your mental health, right?
Of course, if American employers would just provide a reasonable number of vacation days, this wouldn't be an issue; unfortunately it seems like the company has to squeeze you for every last ounce of productivity, even when squeezing less might make you more productive.
This is a list of the amount of paid days you are required to give your employees:
Finland 30
Frankrike 30
Förenade Arab Emiraten 30
Estland 28
Litauen 28
Polen 26
Danmark 25
Grekland 25
Luxemburg 25
Sverige 25
Österrike 25
Israel 24
Malta 24
Tyskland 24
Ungern 23
Portugal 22
Spanien 22
Cypern 21
Egypten 21
Marocko 21
Rumänien 21
Sydafrika 21
Australien 20
Belgien 20
Bulgarien 20
Irland 20
Italien 20
Japan 20
Lettland 20
Nederländerna 20
Nya Zeeland 20
Slovakien 20
Slovenien 20
Storbritannien 20
Tjeckien 20
Sydkorea 19
Malaysia 16
Libanon 15
Hong Kong 14
Pakistan 14
Singapore 14
Taiwan 14
Vietnamn 14
Indien 12
Indonesien 12
Kanada 10
Thailand 6
Filipinerna 5
USA 0
from unt.se
i was going to make a snide joke: how can a private eye spy on a guy in a dark basement room with no windows, who doesn't eat, sleep or use the bathroom (real WoW payers use Depends!)
but then i thought: if you are playing WoW instead of going to work today, you really are suffering from a kind of sickness, aren't you?
and therefore, you are using your sick day appropriately
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Employee longevity has dropped from 30-some years to about 3. Maybe corporate hiring policy should take that into account when doling out vacation time. I may not have been with the company for long, but I do have 20 years behind me and would like a new position to start out with something more than 2 weeks off.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
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?
...on the Sunday morning when I'm on an eight hour outage call starting at 4AM...
or the Monday night when I stay at the office until 10 working on a time sensitive launch...
do they turn the "hooky" clock backwards in that case?
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Don't be fooled. This is a power play by employers to take even more power from the deunionized employee base. They want to destroy the middle class once and for all and the best way to do that is to reduce the employee to utter powerlessness and promote only the obsequious.
If the boss gets pissed off, a team of investigators can permanently neutralize you. If you think the Union leader can protect you then they'll neutralize him too via investigation. It's a new way to find dirt on people, and it's creepy.
So the PI uses the honey trap on you, you flirt with this new woman and now the PI gives that information to your boss. If you piss off your boss you can lose both your career and your marriage? Tell me how this can be avoided.
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.
You don't think most of the people at the top aren't sociopaths?
The sad fact is that to reach those high levels, it's not only not a hindrance, it's practically a requirement. It's not an indictment of successful people, but rather the way "the system" works. Sociopathy is ultimately rewarded, while honesty, thrift, efficiency... all those things we were taught are good are often impediments to rising through the ranks.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
Will the executives be subject to this also? I can suggest staking out golf courses, marinas (when weather is nice of course), Martha's Vineyard (or wherever the local trophy home location is), and their secretary's apartments.
The title of the article is deceptive though. It isn't about people being stalked because they took a sick day or two off, it is about people abusing long term medical leave. That I have to admit I don't have a problem with them investigating. If you say you are unable to work because you can't walk and they catch you helping your neighbor move a sofa down 5 flights of stairs then I'd agree you should be busted.
Investigating someone for being out 3 days with the flu strikes me as a bit petty though. Maybe the problem at that point is your employees need some vacation time or you just have lousy moral. Firing people left and right won't make the remaining ones any better and won't guarantee you will magically get a flood of super workers to replace them (or that they won't end up as unhappy as the first bunch).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
iDoubt it.
"But this one goes to 11!"
This does not include days like Halloween and Christmas etc.
Who the hell gets Halloween as a paid holiday?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
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
The hyperbole is strong with this one! No, unions are not inherently bad. But can't we appreciate the irony of teachers' pension funds being wiped out when GM defaulted on their bonds so that unions could have THEIR benefits?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Companies hire you for a 40-hour work week, and then feel no compunction about working you twice that. I know of more than one company that refuses to allow employees to take vacations -- always "too busy now, try again in a couple of months" -- and then institute "hour caps." effectively screwing workers out of their vacations. I know of others that refuse to allow legitimate comp time to be taken.
Once upon a time, after working three 70-hour weeks back-to-back-to-back, and then being asked to put in a fourth week of the same, I came down with a good solid, three-day case of the "flu." To be honest, I actually did feel like hell.
Workers start faking sick days when companies fail to honor their agreements on reasonable work weeks, vacations and comp time.
Now, companies have started hiring private detectives to shadow workers outside of the job. Welcome back to the bad old days of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective_Agency
During the labor unrest of the late 19th century, businessmen hired Pinkerton agents to infiltrate unions, and as guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories. The best known such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
The private detectives aren't there just to enforce sick days. They're also there to quash the unions you advocate as a solution.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."