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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."
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
Yeah, except that you get sick and you spend your entire time "off" in bed. I had that once and I hated it.
If I'm sick, I'm told to stay home, and I'll happily try to do some work from there. If you tell me that I'll lose vacation time by staying home, I'm gonna come into the office short being unable to walk. Take your pick, which do you prefer?
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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?
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
You could try being faithful to your wife . . . .
As much as I hate the canard about "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", there is a valid corollary: "If you've done nothing wrong, you won't get caught".
www.wavefront-av.com
>> Tell me how this can be avoided.
Well one way would be for the average worker to get a clue and stop living hand-to-mouth, spending every dollar they make to buy shit they don't really need...
In money there is power, but the average worker does not see that. If all workers had enough saved to tide them over for a few months, then workers could call the shots on how they should be treated and stand up to their a-hole bosses and corporations. I've done it and so has my wife, to the betterment of our lives and careers.
But seeing as the average worker is saddled with so much debt they need their weekly paycheck just to stay afloat; they have essentially placed all the power in the hands of a-hole bosses and shitty corporate environments who, believe me, realize this fact and take full advantage of it.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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.
No, the real question is why are they so STUPID!!!
I agree that there is a strong neo-feudalism movement afoot. I don't think it's any sort of conspiracy, it's merely that class of people doing the type of things that they are prone to do, and neo-feudalism is the logical end-game. But I still assert that it is STUPID, because serfs don't buy the company's products. Each company seems to have this idea that they can drive THEIR employees down into the dirt, and "somebody else" will buy their products, presumably other company's employees. But when all of the companies are doing this, the pool of "somebody else" dwindles. It's just not a sustainable model.
I suspect that in the modern globalized world US companies expect that the growing middle class in the Far East will buy their products. But even if they can either eliminate every US worker or drive every US worker's pay down to 3rd world levels, their products will STILL have the overhead of an astronomically overpaid executive suite. What's worse is that the executive suite has generally grown addicted to cost reduction as the means of profit improvement. Most of them aren't worth spit in terms of bringing truly innovative products to market, improving the revenue side of the equation. (Reality distortion field aside, and though from everything I've heard he's a real prick, I have a strong sense of respect for Steve Jobs for just this reason.)
Congress isn't doing spit about it because:
1 - They won't cross their big donors.
2 - Republicans tend to believe that the wealthy are that way because they deserve it, and therefore they have the recipe for success, and need to be left alone to continue fostering success. (Particularly in the current situation, I believe that the "recipe for success" is short-term, a catastrophe in the making for the rest of the country and only a cushy retirement plan for those execs.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Seriously. I worked as an Assistant MIS Director at a university. I worked my way up from student worker.
My boss complained when I came in at 8:05 AM after staying until 10:00 PM the night before, and I didn't get overtime!
I told her, "Fine, but be careful of what you wish for. From now on, I will come in at 8:00 on the dot every morning. But I will take a break from 10 AM to 10:15 AM, no matter who is here, what they want or what's on fire. I will leave for lunch at noon exactly and I will come back at 1. I will leave at 5 on the dot, and don't expect me to stay a minute later. If you want to count time, that's what we'll do."
Sure enough, since we were hopelessly understaffed, there was a line in my cubicle at 10 AM. Too bad. I put up a pre-printed sign that said, "On Break" and made them wait. There was a major problem right before lunch the same day, but I went ahead and left it. (The network admin had to struggle through it, but he applauded me for doing the right thing.) When I came back at 1, she brought me into her office and told me that she had rethought it and that I was right!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
As much as I hate the canard about "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", there is a valid corollary: "If you've done nothing wrong, you won't get caught".>
Of course that's tempered by:
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
You can easily get caught on things you didn't do. Not having done them is a useful defense, but these days the accusation is as damaging as the conviction. Just ask anyone wrongfully accused of sexual harrassment or child abuse.
What I find strange is how the working and middle classes feel entitled to so much more than they did only a few years ago in the 1980s. I had two college-educated parents with jobs, and I still had to share a room with my sister until I was ten. We had a small 19" TV and an antenna, because, according to my dad, it was 'absurd' to spend $20/month for cable. We crammed our family of five into a tiny Mazda when the station wagon was in the shop. The heat never came on until mid-November, and it never went above 62F.
Now it seems that even welfare moms feel entitled to cell phones, cable TV, mid-range sedans, 70-degree apartments, and endless subsidized premium cereal for their already obese children. Seriously, try restricting any of the above for the people who are collecting government assistance, and watch as you are made out to be a corporate villain.
There was recently a news article about how the local groceries have to staff-up for the first of the month. The (stay-at-home) mom (of five) complained how the benefits weren't enough, since she had to ration the cereal or it would run out and the kids would have to eat oatmeal for the rest of the month. My eyes bugged-out. Of course you have to ration 'sugar pops', I got one bowl a week, oatmeal was the standard breakfast of the middle class.
We need a hardcore reality check and fiscal literacy like no other culture in history.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails