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Stay Home When You're Sick!
theodp writes "If you've got Google CEO Larry Page's billions, you can reduce your chances of getting sick this winter by personally providing free flu shots to all San Francisco Bay Area kids at Target pharmacies. 'Vaccinating children,' explains the Shoo the Flu initiative's website, 'will not only improve children's health, it will also dramatically reduce the risk of the flu spreading to adults.' But Tim Olshansky doesn't have Page's money, so he'll have to settle for trying to get it through people's thick heads that they really have to stay home when they're sick. 'Why do people still come to the office when they're coughing up a lung?' asks the exasperated Olshansky. 'Because unfortunately, there is a still a strong perverse culture that equates staying at home when sick with weakness. This is a flawed belief and should be questioned. Given that we have the tools now to complete most tasks from home, there is no strong reason to compel people to come to the workplace.' So, does your employer encourage employees to stay home when they're sick? How?"
So, basically, stay home, but keep working? Remember when sick days were to allow you to actually rest?
By firing us if we don't show up to work!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Going home sick means using sick time. Getting sick time means getting paid not not work. Getting paid to not work means socialism. Socialism = communism.
QED.
It's not the sign of weakness that keeps people coming in, it's the threat of being fired. Some employers are really good about giving sick days (and bless them), but some bosses I have worked for took the line that "you come in, or else". Given the choice between spreading a cold around the office or losing my job, guess which option I took?
Aren't in the US sick leaves taken from your holiday ? You might then have your response right there. Because in europe they are not, and you are quite encouraged (at least in my firm) to take the day off when you are a virus mothership spreading thema round coughing.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
I'd say most people with the common chest/head cold don't want to waste their sick days for something less severe. If I'm hung over, puking up a lung and have a freight train driving through my head - then yes, it's time to use a sick day!
"Because unfortunately, there is a still a strong perverse culture that equates staying at home when sick with weakness. This is a flawed belief and should be questioned."
That's not it at all. People still go to work when they're sick because:
A: They don't want to use up sick days unless they absolutely have to because if they get sick without having any time left, they don't get paid
B: Some employers equate staying home sick with "not being a team player" (or some variant thereof) and will actively discourage any time off unless forced
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
if you have kids you have to leave enough days to stay home with sick kids. that means you get your a$$ into the office and infect everyone else if you get sick
my oldest kid was sick literally every 2-3 weeks at one point while in day care. he spent just over a year taking anti-biotics almost non stop
Who uses sick days to be sick? If I'm going to be sick and miserable, I'd rather be at work!
Put a SIPRnet connection in my home and I'll be happy to work from there and not come in when I'm sick.
I find this to be true for most businesses; officially you may be encouraged to stay at home when you are ill, but in reality your manager will "joke" and make references to "man flu" and even mention to you that your amount of sick days are above average for a year.
When your manager does these things, he is encouraging you to come in to work when sick, even if he/she doesn't realise it. Nobody wants to be seen as taking the piss with sick leave even though even if everyone was completely genuine, there HAS to be somebody in the office with above average number of sick days.
What the hell is it with people thinking that people actually want to go to work when they're sick?
They have to because they only have so many sick days and, being unable to control how many days per year they'll be sick, it's only smart to save the things until they're desperately needed. Otherwise you end up vomiting one day and have to cut into your vacation time by taking a vacation day. Wonderful vacation there, staying home vomiting all day long.
Also, don't forget that employers hate it when their employees aren't at work. "You're sick? Fuck you, get your ass in here and earn me some money. I'll be sure not to give you such a large share of it that you can even afford to think about not coming in to work when you're sick, you selfish bastard. Worship my job-creating awesomeness!"
People go to work when they're sick because they don't have a choice. Same reason they drive to work even after some unavoidable event kept them awake all night.
It'It's a case of the employer demanding people come into work sick. They get mad if you call in sick and think you are lying or exaggerating about your illness. Many a person has been fired for staying home sick. We don't all have nice employers who treat us well. Also some of us can't afford to take time off of work because we are paid by the hour. It can mean the difference between making rent that month or not. Some employers insist that you get $20 doctors note saying you’re sick with the flu before you allowed back to work after an illness. It is employer’s way of discouraging people from calling in sick.
Not sure how it works in USA, but in Sweden the "default" rule (= the minimum that you as a company must do) is that on your first sick day, you get no salary. After that, you get 80% of your salary. If you come back and become sick again, the cycle repeats.
However, many companies, include mine, have taken a more generous stand. We give you 80% from day one, and if you feel sufficiently well that you can still be somewhat productive at home (e.g. answer mail or whatever), you get 100%.
My company used to have a policy of "stay home when you are sick" and didn't force you to use vacation leave when you were sick. You just called in sick and that was it. And the company did fine. Sure, a few people abused it, but that happens with any benefit.
Then they changed the policy so that sick time came out of your vacation. Now people show up to work sick all the time.
Stupid, I tell you.
Is he saying that people shouldnt' come into work with flu (fair enough, but I can't believe that many do?) or is he saying they shouldn't come in whenever they have a cold (which seems a bit much - I'd probably get a couple of months off a year if I did that)?
We get 5 weeks of vacation per year(not counting holidays). We can use it how we need to. I have had this my last 2 employers now and it makes sense. Whether you want to take off for Christmas, goof off or if you get the flu, to the company its all the same.
I have a mortgage to pay and 2 sick days a year.
Tomorrow is another day...
keeping your kids home from daycare or school when they are sick so my kids don't get sick and then stick their fingers in my mouth, spreading the love.
This has nothing to do with weakness.
Truth is that missing work sucks. If you can't find someone to cover for you while you are sick, you risk losing your job.
And forget about staying home if you're a college or graduate student. Miss a single one of those upper level math/science classes and suddenly you're in a hole that can be very difficult to climb out of.
There is also a strong, perverse culture where most workers who stay home sick get fucked with twice as much work to do the next day they come in (and god forbid you are out for more than one day). Poor management organization requiring one worker to basically be responsible for a slice of work without a clear ability to offload is pretty much the norm in the US. Change that and maybe workers wouldn't see such a strong disadvantage to staying home (or, even less likely, get companies to truly embrace telecommuting for ANY knowledge worker, not just the pampered ones).
If we're sick enough to be contagious, but healthy enough to work, we telecommute. If we show up sick and coughing everyone yells at you to go home. There's nothing I do at work, that I can't do at home just as well, other than maintain a team dynamic, and a few days working from home now and then don't hurt that.
My company, though located in Sweden, have taken this generous stand.
When home sick, you still get 80% of your full salary, regardless of the length of your illness (the default law in Sweden is that you get no salary on day one, but 80% after that. That is, we skip the day one part). However, if you feel sufficiently well so that you are able to be somewhat productive, meaning answer mails or whatnot, you get 100%.
I haven't worked for a company that actually has sick days in over a decade. Even salaried employees like myself have to use their vacation time if they get sick (how does that make sense?). Fortunately, I can work from home whenever I want but most others do not have that luxury.
I understand that many employers have made this move because people would abuse sick time, but if they implemented a system whereby employees could draw from their sick pool instead of vacation pool if they presented a doctor's note, I think that productivity overall would increase.
I had the flu a few years back, took 2 weeks to shake it. My work only allots 5 days for sick leave per year. After that its either take vacation days to be compensated or take unpaid leave. I took a few sick days for the worst of it and then sucked it up the following week and just came in to work. I did not want to cut into my vacation time. Call me selfish but that's that way its is. And I doubt I spread it because I always wash my hands, keep away from the coffee pot and sit in a cubical. Thankfully i don't get sick very often.
You show up sick in our department and I throw you out for being so damn stupid!
You're missing C: Many employers don't give sick days anymore, and require people to use their vacation time. I haven't had separate paid sick days for over a decade, and with limited vacation time I can't afford to stay home unless I'm simply incapable of going to work...
Take two, you'll feel better in the morning.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If I come to work sick, nothing bad happens to me. If I stay home, I have to use some of my scarce vacation time to do so. We don't get sick days here in the USA, and while we do get vacation days, we only get a few. By the time I have to burn them for house and car repair emergencies I can't take any actual "vacation" as it is. If I burned any as sick days I'd really be in a heap of hurt.
So, stay home being miserable while losing a precious vacation day or go to work and be miserable without losing anything.
Duh. :-)
Among those who have the luxury of a stay-at-home spouse or for whom daycare expenses are not a consideration, I'll bet a lot more people come into the office sick during the summer and school vacation weeks.
I work in the service industry - which I enjoy - but there are no sick days for the people who bag your groceries or new shoes. If we want our paltry pay, we drag our sick selves to work and try not to sneeze too much on your produce. "Stay home," they say. I wish!
This has nothing to do with "appearing weak". This has everything to do with deadlines not moving despite you being sick. Employers don't care about you being sick, they just want something shipped, and if you can't do that, they will find someone who will.
Sorry but I work in an enormous office complex where international folks are in and out all day long spreading their germs and diseases. I'm sick 3-4 months out of the year as a result and I only get 8 paid sick days a year, the rest is my precious vacation time. If I dont come to work, I don't get paid. I'm not staying home when I can come to work and spread the love.
The above comments are quite true. Most people I know won't take a sick day unless they absolutely have to. With the decline of worker unions and the rise of the corporate state, everyone is in fear of being fired, replaced, unemployed and eventually homeless. What's the phrase that my boss uses?
"You should be happy you have a job to go to. A lot of people don't." ...and like that, the boss has just discouraged everyone from taking a sick day when needed. The thought of being unemployed is enough to get people to show up and work when sick.
I've got co-workers who have kids (I do not) and they all use their sick time solely for when their kids are sick.
The company I work for treats your "sick time" and "vacation time" the same. If you need a sick day, you just lost a vacation day. We're all pretty much in agreement at work that if you're gonna be miserable because you're sick, you may as well go to work and be miserable. Save the days off for when you can enjoy the time.
This is simply a side effect of the anti-labor mentality that has been encouraged in the US since the 80s. Corporations are people and they are expected to be as crass as possible. The needs of the individual are irrelevant. It's only corporations that matter. You should feel lucky that some "job creator" allows you to be employed. You should be happy to be exploited with impugnity and without recourse.
Sick days? That's a commie anarchist idea.
This is the new Guilded Age. Get back to work.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How the hell am I supposed to go home and avoid my cowirkers when I have the flu?
I wonder if there is a study on the rate of definite infection by disease among those in an open-plan office space versus those in a personal office.
It might be that those promoting a "come in, or else" policy might be relatively unlikely to personally suffer any consequence of it.
They have to because they only have so many sick days and, being unable to control how many days per year they'll be sick, it's only smart to save the things until they're desperately needed. Otherwise you end up vomiting one day and have to cut into your vacation time by taking a vacation day. Wonderful vacation there, staying home vomiting all day long. ..SNIP.. People go to work when they're sick because they don't have a choice.
So you're saying people would rather to spread sickness to others than use up their vacation. That sounds like choice to me.
SMEs cannot afford to do this.
My employer will not pay me for the first 3 days I am sick, after that I get full pay. It's pretty reasonable IMO, but as I cannot afford to lose a day or twos wages so I have no choice but to go in to work.
On the other hand, if I got all my sick days paid, I'd definitely abuse it once or twice a year.. I'd imagine a large majority would.
From what I understand contagion and symptoms are not really linked.
In many cases you are most contagious before you even know you are sick, in others you are still very contagious after you recover completely. It depends on the specific illness.
Staying home when you feel bad is about not working when you physically cannot work and not really very good at all at stopping the spread of these illnesses.
Now personally, I like working when I am sick. I would rather work when I am sick and have time off while I am healthy. But that depends a lot on the nature and severity of the illness, as well as the job.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
everyone knows sick days are for:
1. hangovers, or continuing benders
2. doing something important or fun that can only be done during workday
3. job interview
but as for going to work and making your boss or asshole coworkers sick, so what? fuck 'em!
that during a brief time while working in the food service industry as both a waiter and a chef, calling in sick was not considered 'acceptable'
this, was appalling. I cant think of how many people got sick as a result of their waiter having a cold or the flu and not being allowed to call off. and on top of that, who the hell would want to get their food delivered by someone who is coughing and sneezing all over the place?
maybe that's why they went out of business
Also not providing us with insurance. We also can get fired or otherwise disciplined for taking too many days off when we're sick. Like say, three solid days of vomiting and diarrhea that they feel would have been much better spent at work. This is the norm in the US, not the exception.
For me, it is a gaping zero ! I have total of 15 workdays under the name of PTO (Paid Time Off) or MTO (Managed Time Off). Use them when you are sick or when you want to take a day or two off for vacation. Also I have a generous holiday allowance, which amounts to a whopping 6 days per year.
I don't know about you but, I like taking vacations. since 3 weeks is barely enough for taking a vacation and maybe going to somewhere exotic to really break away from the hustle and bustle of the IT shop I'm working at, I have no time left to take off, when I am really sick. You know what ? If I am well enough to drive 30 minutes to the office, you can be sure that I will be "working" that day. At which capacity, is another million dollar question.
So, the employers, who prefer you not to spread your germs to the rest of the healthy population of the company, should re-think about their sick days policy. If you are combining them with the vacations days and forcing employees to take off sick days out of their meager vacation allowance, you are inflicting this onto yourself. I, for one, will not make accommodations for an employer, who make no accommodations for me.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
For several years the companies I've worked for combined sick leave with vacation -- too many people were taking "sick leave" when they just wanted a day off. The people who were honest about it got the short end of the stick. So, rather than demand a doctors note that you were sick, the companies combined sick leave with vacation and called it paid time off.
Now Steve Moron thinks he has 3 weeks "vacation" a year when he really has 3 weeks PTO. When's he's sick, he doesn't want to take vacation and comes in and gets everyone else sick.
It's been scientifically proven
Then prove it or STFU, wanker.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
1) Usually the time away sick is taken away from time for vacation. In the US, PTO is becoming more the norm which lumps vacation and sick all together. Even when you did get sick time, it was poor. 3 days or 5 days. With one bout of the flu, its gone. If you have kids, then you know you will be taking more time away because they are sick and it comes out of your vacation time. 2) Schedules and deadlines don't change because you were sick. You expected to work overtime, make it up, etc etc. There's nothing wrong with the work ethic, if you want to, but when its expected, the stress of it can be worse than muddling through the day at the office sick 3) I cannot count on my hands how many times I have seen employers dock employees reviews because they "took so much sick time". You were sick. Poor thing. No raise for you! 4) Social attitudes. If you call in sick and are found to be "lying", you even risk getting fired. So people do not want to call in sick for fear of assumption that others will think your lying. PTO is suppose to address this but it still happens.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Many employers encourage you to stay home when you're sick -- and then punish you either directly or passive-aggressively when you do.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
From some sort of lurgy.
If you are infective and can't/won't be absent, then just wear a surgical mask. End of story.
Masks can be very effectice in preventing the spread of disease. For some reason, however, it is considered socially unacceptable to wear a mask in most public places (e.g. restaurants, schools, shopping malls). This attitude is what needs to change.
Too bad the vaccines will soon be found to record and store our wifi data.
I made a similar post before seeing this one. You're spot on. Yes its a choice but I can't blame anyone. I'm not saying its right but if you have to chose between losing vacation time (which in the US can be as low as week) or going in sick, well.....
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Well when you have a family and they have been looking forward to that vacation all year, it's not really fair to ask someone to give it up just because they are sick...
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
They are personal days. When you take care of personal business. renew your driver's license, see the doc for your annual checkup, see a dentist, what ever. Now, to keep it fair, you have to do it in full day increments. either personal time or vacation. And every boss know that if you're not in the office, you're not working. Kinda like when your flying coach from Houston to Dubai, you can sleep on the plane and be fresh to start when you get there.
First off, your boss thinks you're just lounging around or hung over and he's pissed that your work output isn't getting done. Your coworkers won't chip in because this is an excellent chance to withhold information and weaken your position while you are out.
And then you're scared to death that the cheap ass systems you manage to hold together will die the day you are out, validating to management and staff that you don't know what you're doing.
And then there's needing to hoard your sick days for all those days that schools are closed or your kid is sick and the school won't let him back for 24 hours, which always means missing two days of school.
At the end of it all, being sick at work is the most rational choice. You also get the opportunity to make the entire office sick, allowing you to lower the overall workload to finally get something done.
well there's your problem. take the fapping energy and apply that to learning a useful skill
Why would I want to waste PTO when I feel miserable? I can get paid and feel miserable. Might as well save it for times when I can enjoy it.
I saw some research into people that "Were Never Sick a Day in Their Lives". Turns out these people get the common cold just as much as the rest of the population, but they don't get the immune system avalanche that give normal humans their symptoms. So even though their not sick, they are infecting the rest of us.
Anyway, imagine you are a boss, and your promotion/bonus is tied to quantifiable goals. You have on your team someone who is never sick, and someone who is sick all the time. Who do you want to keep on your team? Who are you going to give the raise? As long as you work in an environment where "performance" is measured and rewarded, you don't want to appear as a non-performer.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I hate these sayings because many people don't have jobs with sick leave or even medical benefits to allow seeing a doctor. I personally don't want to be told to stay home when I need money to pay bills and to take care of family. Maybe a little less corporate greed and a little more generosity is in order to allow people to stay home when they are sick and get healthy.
At my company we are only given 2 sick days per year, they accrue, so you have to work to get the hours...
so no... given that... not encouraged to stay home sick as you might not have any time, or need to save your time for that really sick day, or need to save your sick day if your child is sick...
really makes me sick thinking about it...(pun)
Normally I cycle 9 miles each way across central London. If I start feeling sick I take a rest by the Tube instead. Works for me. Screw you :P
An easy choice.
I don't give two shits about my co-workers health.
If they don't want to get sick, maybe they should take a day off.
I only stay home if I have a fever and can't get out of bed.
Yes, it's a choice. The choice is "Do I pay my bills this month or stay home and rest?" Not everyone has a salaried job.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Sicktime distinct from vacation or generic PTO, that is. The answer is still the same, though, and should be pretty obvious: if you only get a certain amount of sicktime (40 hours a year, in my case), you would want to save it for when you really needed it. I do stay home if I'm feeling really terrible, but if I think I can work, I go in, because otherwise I'm blowing a whole 5th of my yearly allotted go home sick time.
It's quite common to be bullied about taking a single sick day, to have to call in four hours early, (i.e. 4AM), to have to go to the doctor for a sick note, (most general practitioners have tight schedules as it is; they don't appreciate contagious people wasting their time to confirm that you sound stuffed up and your throat looks red, nevermind having leave your safe and warm home to go into the bitter cold in the first place, or even having the gall to get sick on a weekend, when most general practitioners won't be working). Even with a Doctor's note, there is no guarantee there will be no reprisals. A lot of places that guarantee sick leave don't force it to be paid, and a lot of people are on thin budgets as it is.
If you could just call sick, without having to fight for it, (or even risk your job for it), I'm sure a lot of people would do it more often, (maybe even when not sick, but that's another discussion entirely).
"So, does your employer encourage employees to stay home when they're sick? How?"
My previous employer was an NHS Trust in the north of England. Shortly before I left they brought in a new policy that said that if you were off sick on four or more occasions or for more than 18 days in total in a one year period, you do not get your salary increment for that year.
Way to encourage everyone to come in sick guys!
Also, a single serious illness or accident during that year (think broken leg or something) could result in you losing your salary increment. I'm still amazed this was even legal.
There really should.
There should be a minimum of 1 week per full-time employee of sick time, even if that time is in there vacation time overall. It is unreal some of the conditions employees are put through.
It isn't even a case of the employees sake at all, it is more a case of inefficient work done by said employees at company, as well as spreading the disease around to even more people and ending up taking the entire floor out with them.
Height of stupidity if you ask me.
No, I'd rather have happy productive lemmings. What good is a suicidal lemming? All he is going to do is bring the team down.
As someone mentioned up there, the best method is just say, "you get 5 weeks, do whatever the hell you want with them, just make sure to fill it in on the form or call-in before work in the case of illness or emergencies." (for those cases where groups of people are assigned in rotations)
Bonus points if you have a holiday management system where it shows every employees holidays so you can prevent clashes by design.
Then throw in some gaps every 4 weeks for 1 week and only give out those days if asked specifically. More of an emergency timeslot. (it'd likely not be needed in most job positions though, only those with rotations, which tend to be managed at a more personal level between employees and their bosses or head, I know my mothers boss and her job are like that, very friendly work place it is)
'Why do people still come to the office when they're coughing up a lung?'
Here is the answer: some companies expect you to be at work, irrespective of the state of your health. A previous employer wanted a death notification from an employee three days prior to the employee's death.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I recently went through this. I had the flu and flu-like symptoms for over 2 weeks. Should I have stayed home for over 2 weeks because I was coughing, sneezing, and had congestion? Do you think I would still have a job if I had that many sick days to take? What would happen when I was seriously sick after having wasted 2 weeks worth of sick days because I was blowing my nose and coughing occasionally (though not a lung)?
We need a union for this!
That's sad if just a the boss can see how bad it is for the office for sick people to come then they will be more willing.
I know who is Larry Page, but who the fuck is
Tim Olshansky? If I knew where he works, I may go down there next time I get the flu, just to freak him out.
I am NOT an anti-vaxxer. But the flu shot does not "dramatically reduce" anything. You need to vaccinate 26 kids (healthy kids over age six) to prevent one case of the flu. In kids under two, the inactivated virus vaccines isn't significantly better than a placebo.
For most people the flu shot is a waste of time and money, and a risk of nasty side effects, for little or no benefit.
This is *NOT* a statement about vaccines in general, only about the seasonal flu shot. The flu is different because 1) most cases of what people call "the flu" are not actually influenza, but other viruses; 2) in the general population, influenza is not that serious a disease; and 3) the influenza virus mutates every year.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Most workers do not get sick days or vacation days or even paid holidays. No work means no pay. Which means they cant pay bills
" 'Why do people still come to the office when they're coughing up a lung?' asks the exasperated Olshansky. 'Because unfortunately, there is a still a strong perverse culture that equates staying at home when sick with weakness. ... Given that we have the tools now to complete most tasks from home, ..."
I call bull. Corporate America has done everything it can to discourage staying home, period. I don't know a single person who would actually prefer to be at work while they're sick and miserable; we just don't have any other choice in the matter. For starters, some of us don't have any kind of "sick leave" that we could use for such things... we are forced to take vacation time, or "comprehensive leave" if we stay home sick. And despite the beliefs of some people, (like Olshansky, apparently) most jobs don't even have any kind of a "telecommute" equivalent... mine certainly doesn't.
Tell big businesses to give us back our sick leave, and I'll be happy to stay home and cough up my lungs there instead of in the office. Until then... I still have bills to pay.
At my (rotten defense contractor), each sick day comes off your vacation time to people come to work half-dead....
Not everyone gets paid sick leave. (Contractors, for example)
And if you've been out of work a while, and desperately trying to make up funds for the upcoming Christmas season and pay off bills, every sick day can cost you several hundred bucks even after tax.
So if I go in to the office, and make a few employees sick? Fuck them. They have paid sick leave.
With the down economy, and the current culture of outsourcing, an individual's personal productivity may mean the difference between having a job next year, or not. It *is* perverse, but it's a very real consideration, and the worse the situation gets, the more likely people will be in the office while sick. A few years back, when outsourcing was announced but they had not yet decided who would remain, we all were struggling to show our unique value to the company, and we had one employee who was literally coughing up blood (small amounts, but still...) in his cube but refusing to go home. Others in his department went home in order not to be near him. Foolish, I know, but understandable under certain circumstances.
I'm fortunate in that I can work from home. I have fiber to the house and a job that only occasionally requires my physical presence. Being sick just means I get to work in a fluffy bathrobe. But a forklift operator, for instance, does not have that option.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
People wouldn't be sick as often, exposing healthy people to the germs of their coworker's rugrats.
It's been 20 years and employers still want most IT and dev people on-site and with their thumb on the back of their necks.
We get two weeks vacation/year here, and 5 days of sick leave. You catch one cold, you can't stay out the entire duration. On the bright side,
I will be able to work from home when the situation arises next year. It's my fault I couldn't this year, but I'm finally upgrading the computer to
something more modern.
Who thinks people are heroes when they come in and work 14 hour days and on the weekends all while they are sick and see taking sick days as a sign of professional weakness.
If your employer has this kind of mentality, come in while you are sick, do your job poorly, make everyone else sick, and then watch the company tank (in the meantime dust off your resume and look for new work).
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Had a pointy haired boss who insisted on coming in when he was sick, which wasn't often because he lived alone and had no kids.
This is the kind of guy who doesn't understand that people who have kids that go out of doors and play with other kids tend to get minor illnesses far more often and even pulled the dick move of comparing himself to other people in the office.
In such a circumstance it's very awkward to point out that the guy doesn't have the same social contact other people do, or kids and family so the comments get left unresponded to.
Needless to say, the party broke up.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
There are actually people who want to go to work when they're sick. They define themselves entirely by their careers, and literally have no idea how to spend their time if they aren't working.
Frankly, I think it's a mental illness.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Where I work we have a very straightforward policy. If you are sick, stay home. If you aren't, come to work.
No set number of sick days, no use them or lose them, no saving them in case your kid is sick.
And when people show up here sick, they are sent home. No reason to be here infecting everyone.
To those who say "just get the flu shot" please know that it's only a partial solution which varies in effectiveness from year to year. I don't know if you caught the news item the other day, how the influenza vaccine last year turned out to not be a good match to the strain that was making the rounds. They were hoping that this year's shot would be more effective. The point is, mass vaccination *helps* but good habits and isolating the sick are still important.
Parenthetically, I agree that the bug seems to be spread most commonly by children. When my daughter got out of public school, I got sick a lot less often. Now that she works in a day care center, I will probably catch everything going around.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You don't need to stay home when you sick, you just need to follow simple hygienic practices and the risk will be greatly reduced. First of all cough into your sleve at all times, never shake hands, use hand sanitizer, don't share food etc... etc... etc... most people are slobs that have the hygiene of a garbage can that hasn't been emptied. It's not rocket science, just stay clean even when your sick and the risk will decrease automatically. The issue is that most people don't work and operate clean, most people are no better then peasants were in the 15th century.
Here is a list of reasons people still go into work sick....
* Fear of losing their job
* Management scrutinizes number of sick days taken and what days of the week they are taken, too many that bump up against a weekend are considered suspicious. They forget that people pick up bugs over the weekend because that's when someone's out in public getting personal errands run, so Monday sick days are frown upon. Being bogged down with piles of work due to thin workforce causes a stress level increase and after so much time of being stressed and over-worked, by Friday you're exhausted, and those days are frowned upon for being missed.
* Teams are cut to the bone so by missing a day of work unexpectedly means that when you do go back to work you have to catch up on the work you didn't do when you were sick.
* People don't go to the doctor until too late and go into work contagious without realizing they are contagious.
* Many companies are combining Vacation and Sick time to save company money and call it PTO time (Paid Time Off). Most people try to save their PTO time for fun vacations, not lying in be sick.
* Some companies that offer sick time still have earned sick time, so if you haven't earned sick time, you are expected to use vacation time. Employees see this as unfair and come into work sick.
* Some companies say there's an arbitrary number of allowed sick days a year, even though it's not in the employee hand-book, and you get dinged on year-end reviews if you used or exceed this arbitrary number
* Since some companies are in states where Unions prevail in the workforce, the companies are always at battle with those few employees who abuse the sick time policies of a company. I saw this personally when living in a Pro-Union state. There were union employees who would take 20-30 sick days a year and be caught taking trips and vacations when claiming sick. This happened with non-union employees also, but in my experience the union employees abused sick time more often than non-union.
* Sick time use appears to be more accepted by Parents with children than Child-less employees, but this is only an observation.
I'm sure there are many more reasons.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
...to everyone ELSE in the office as a way to kill efficiency. Send one person home to sleep it off, or get everyone sick -- are managers really this dumb?
The distance record for spooge could be a useful skill
Yeah, sign of weakness, indeed. Either the guy is completely out of touch with the US work culture, or he's just pretending to not see the reality. Either way, you know whose side he is on, and whose mouthpiece he is. Nothing other than a fucking PR effort, meaningless noise. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
My employer has a sick leave policy called Reasonable Time Off. None of us has sick days. There's no pool of time that you have to worry about. If you're sick, you can (supposedly) simply take the day off and stay home. People do actually use it. A lot of us will continue to do work from home, but log off for stretches of time to nap/rest/whatever. But, it does help having this policy. We can even use it for simple things such as medical checkups and dental procedures/cleanings.
Since almost all of our meetings now have conference bridges attached to them it's quite easy for folks to check in from home and still attend meetings they feel they absolutely need to attend. Couple that with our secure remote access tools and people can still be productive when they stay home if they choose. This is especially helpful when a parent stays home with a sick child.
Personally I know that I typically tend to get miserably sick for a day or two and need to rest. Then I'm usually feeling a little better, but not great, for a day or two. So being able to stay home as needed and work from home when I feel up to it helps me not feel pressured into coming into the office and getting others sick too. Plus the couple times I've had to have surgery I did not feel bad in the slightest that I actually took the time off of work to recuperate that I needed.
Managers around here seem to trust employees for the most part. But, if it looks like someone is abusing the policy they may raise questions. Most people I work with are pretty responsible about it though because they know how good of a benefit this really is. And, none of us wants to be forced into a PTO type system.
To give you an idea of the scale of this benefit, we employ nearly twenty thousand people in our HQ facilities around the metro area. With a single floor of one of our office towers easily holding in the neighborhood of a hundred people. Our downtown towers are all interconnected by a skyway system that includes many other buildings as well. So one person coming into the office sick has the potential to affect hundreds or thousands of other people. If we can reduce that even a bit it helps everyone out.
Companies screwed us out of sick time by combining it with vacation time and calling it PTO. Now I'm out of it. Either give me sick time back, or get sick with me!!
At my last job, I worked for an MSP. We were technically able to perform our duties from anywhere there was an internet connection. That didn't matter to the people in charge. Working at home was forbidden except for very rare occasions. You were made to feel like some kind of worthless pussy if you called out sick. The flu regularly made the rounds in our office because of this. If I heard someone coughing and sneezing and blowing their nose I would go home that night and make sure I had medicine for when my turn inevitably came.
It wasn't just illness, either. Our office was open during blizzards, and we were expected to get there. When the snow was so deep on my unplowed street that my car high centered (after I spent a couple hours digging out my driveway to even make it to the street), I got shit for it when I called to tell them I wasn't going to be able to make it in. Another time the office only closed because the first guy who got there for the early shift found that the storm had knocked out the power.
I have been gone from that job for a year, but keep in touch with friends still there. I found out that they decided to open for business as usual the day Hurricane Sandy hit, and then closed at 10:30am once local conditions started to get bad. They made everyone risk life and limb on the roads to spend two fucking hours in the office doing work they could have done just as easily at home-- this while the government was telling people to stay the fuck home.
I have decided that they won't change this ridiculous behavior until they get sued because someone gets injured or killed while trying to get to the office in extremely poor conditions when the office should be closed.
I have 10 paid sick days included in my work contract. But if I take more than 2 consecutive sick days (remember a real flu last about 1 week), I need to go see a Dr and get a med ticket. Not doing it means not being paid.
So instead of resting to get better ASAP, I need to go to the clinic, wait for my turns, tell the doctor my symptoms, listen to the doctor telling me that instead of waiting for a Dr, I should just rest, me telling him I need this dammit med ticket to get paid, and then finally losing 2 to 3 hours of rests...
This mean, the third day I'm going back to work unless I'm about to die and infect all the department...
This reminds me of a funny time a while back in high school. I got very sick the entirety of my spring break. What are the odds of that? I had just recently got off a stomach flu that put me out for about two or three days, but I think that it should not be counted against me towards my break. Sick happens, the world moves on, so why should I have to drop everything I do simply because someone else who isn't sick and is just as competent can't do it as a replacement?
I like how he assumes most tasks can be done from home. Living in a fantasy land must be nice. Manual labor is required and majority of US jobs.
Managers (and the managers of managers) create the environment that causes people to work when they are sick. At my company, sick time is separate from vacation time, and managers send sick people home if they come to work sick. If management fosters a culture where people fear for their jobs or dont care about their coworkers.....well then maybe spreading the flu is not the company's biggest problem.
What is the exact reason you think that you need all of your people actually nose to muzzle on a day to day basis?? If its the real time "Face to Face" thing then for all that matters you could have everybody meet on your corporate sim on the SL grid
Short answer is, because despite the antisocial tendencies of the computer community that reads /., human interactions --meaning "real time face to face" interaction, as you put it (what used to be called "talking to people" in the old days)--are valuable, and that doesn't mean text and document exchange, nor even skype. And "corporate sim" is not actually face to face.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Wrong. Weakness has nothing to do with it. In the states, most large companies anymore have what is called "PTO" Paid Time Off. If you can schedule in advance then you can use those PTO days as vacation, in theory, without penalty. Though they do of course get logged. If you get sick and have to call in last minute, you can usually still be paid from your PTO, but you get "attendance points" for doing so.
You also get "attendance points" if you are late or absent for any reason. After a certain number of "attendance points" you are fired. Regardless of where the points came from. Sick, late, no show. Doesn't matter. So even though you can be sick and still be paid, you will get fired for it in short order. Mind you most places I've worked the PTO accrues at apx .02 hours of PTO per hour worked so roughly an hour a week.
Also, ANY type of advancement or promotion tends to look at used PTO. The more PTO you've used the less likely you are to get raises, promotions, etc. That INCLUDES pre-approved vacation time.
This is from my own experience of course. But it was this way at American Express, Amazon, Go Daddy, AOL, 2Wire, and several other places I've worked.
Someone is wasting modpoints for obvious troll.
Here in Norway it is required by law that every employee has the possibility to call in sick for 4x3 days per 12 months (not by calendar year). This is with 100% pay, no questions asked. If you're reall sick, and has to get sickleave, this will not count in on the 12 days as long as you get medical confirmation. Sickleave is also with 100% pay btw.
In addition every parent has the right to stay home when their kid/babysitter is sick, I believe that is upto 20 days a year. This is also with 100% pay.
A fun thing is also that if you get sick on your vacation days, you'll get replacement vacation days. This is only for the 5 weeks of required vacation, not the national holidays though.
quite frankly Businesses should consider trying to get as many folks to work from home as possible.
My business and the business of nearly $4 trillion of the US GDP is in manufacturing. You cannot manufacture most items from home. It is quite literally impossible. You need to be at your place of business to do most useful work in manufacturing. The same applies to retail, transportation, food service and health care industries among many others. You have to be there to be useful. Add in the fact that many, many workers are hourly employees and beyond a limited amount of sick/personal time they don't get paid if they aren't present.
IT is an exception when it comes to telecommuting. Most jobs require having a body in the office/plant for a very good reason. I know there are a lot of IT workers here on slashdot but recognize that your situation is somewhat unique compared to most.
Working from home is nice, except now managers are seeing the following:
Andy works from home
Andy's job can be done remotely.
Andy's job can thus be moved overseas where it will be done remotely by lower paid people
Andy understand this, thus never works from home to keep his job.
We sort of eliminated "sick" days by combining sick, personal, and vacation days all into Paid Time Off (PTO).
That doesn't work well when you have to plan your staffing levels in advance. In our company the amount of product we can produce is a direct function of the number of people present. If we allowed people to call in last minute for any day off it would make scheduling an absolute nightmare.
...The jobs with the absolute most people interaction. There is a "strong perverse culture", but it's not tough guys/gals not wanting to look weak, it's wage slaves terrified they will lose some pay or their job. I have a feeling Mr. Olshansky has 'binders full of women' who will back up his claims about why people don't stay home when they are sick.
The one time in recent years that I persisted with coming to work with a nasty case of the flu, was the first two weeks of a new job. This was a tough call for me. I didn't want all my new co-workers to hate me but at the same time, I new it would look bad if I called in sick on my first week of work.
Posting as AC, as I'm at work. I made it a point to tell my whole team of engineers to stay at home when sick. We've got VPN access for a reason. I also mentioned that if peoplea re sick and working from home, I do not expect them to be very productive, and I expect that they will be taking frequent breaks to rest or be comfortable. If the illness is just too disruptive to work, I tell them to just stay home and take the day off and rest. A full day of rest can really make a difference. If they do not have a PTO day available, I can find ways to work it out.
I also provide masks at the office, in case someone simply can't resist coming in for a short time, or to collect any books or materials they might need while at home. Masks cannot prevent the spread of sickness, but they do serve as a barrier to touching the nose and mouth (and then leaving microbes on door handles and elevator buttons), and will help reduce airborne spray when coughing or sneezing. I have sent employees home on many occasions, and I have no trouble doing this. In college I used to work as a cook, and my bosses were very strict about not being sick when coming into the kitchen. It serves as a great model for a healthy office workplace, as it turns out.
Quite honestly, coming in sick is a big problem for hourly wage earners, because staying home when ill can be very costly, especially when those wages are low. I think that it's incumbent upon managers to account for this and find ways for an employee who is being responsible to make up the time (and hence income) as soon as possible after they recover.
It's not about being nice or sympathetic to suffering... though I try very hard to be both. It's about making sure that people are as productive and comfortable in the workplace as possible, and reducing the impact of a single individual's illness on the rest of the organization.
...Or, your company has a ridiculous policy of making you use your vacation days as sick days!
Seriously. I get full pay for 6 months then half pay for six months if I'm off sick. Does that make my country a filthy commie country? Does that make me a freeloader? A loser? No it's treating people like humans. Sometimes people get sick. That's bad enough without making them fear for their jobs and homes as a result. It's inhumane.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Wow. I want to swap places with the author of the quoted piece. I don't go into work when I'm sick because the alternative is viewed as weakness. I go into work when I don't feel so hot because:
a) The economy is terrible and my current position is a contracting role. If I don't work I don't get paid. No sick days and we can't afford my just taking days off. This puts me in a tough position. First, work when sick which means I'm less productive and I'm getting others at work sick making them and the office less productive. But all of that is outweighed by the food it keeps on the table and the roof it keeps over my family's head.
b) Many employers look down on employees who use sick days for being sick. Amazing I know but that's how it is. Contractors are especially under the microscope on this as they hope to move from contracting roles to permanent hired roles. The last thing they can afford is to be viewed as someone who takes time off.
The idea that most people go to work when sick to avoid being thought of as weak is ludicrous.
it doesn't make sense to have sick people come in!
The employer has to balance the risk of communicating illness and losing more productivity in the future with the immediate loss of productivity today. Not all illnesses are communicable nor are all of them of equal severity. Furthermore many people "call in sick" when they really are not sick at all which means the employer is possibly paying them to not work in addition to the certain loss of productivity. Overly generous sick day policies absolutely will be abused in many work places. It's not a question of being evil, it's a question of balancing the needs of the workers against the needs of the business and trying to find a happy medium.
From the worker's perspective many workers are paid hourly and if they take a day off for illness they do not get paid. Again, not all illnesses are communicable nor are all of them of equal severity. You may be miserable but able to work with a bad headache and still be productive. Many workers are professionals who take their duties seriously even when they don't feel well. And sometimes the consequences of missing a work day are worse (or perceived to be worse) than the consequences of reduced productivity.
I work in the healthcare industry, and in a hospital environment (and a prestigious one at that). Coming in sick will get you sent home, or even fired if the wrong people find out about it. Still, that doesn't stop anyone from doing it, because the simple truth is that when you're not given paid leave for sick days, or being paid enough to afford to take a day off (none of us are), 90% of the time people will come in sick and risk losing their job, rather than staying home and risk losing their house/car/whatever, because when you're always down to the wire living paycheck to paycheck, you just can't afford to stay home sick, so you just dope up on cough suppressants and hope nobody notices.
As an extra disincentive to calling in, our employer even requires doctors' notes from people who opt to stay home sick without pay, knowing full well that since they don't provide us with medical insurance either, we can't afford to see a doctor and get the note.
So if you want to know why illness spreads so readily around the workplace in America, you need look no further than the business practices of the employers. It's not the employees being hard-headed about staying home, it's because they don't have any real choice in the matter.
I want to stay home when I am sick. Sadly I am allergic to dust (and a few other unavoidables), so I never quite get that much respite, and am normally going back and forth between being stuffed up and not, on a normal day. I also tend to develop a cough in the winter, dry air really kills me. I can try to humidify all I want, and it does help, but... theres only so much I can do. I sneeze and cough sick or not.
Often I just don't know that I am sick until long after I am in the office, about the only way I can stay out of the office, garaunteed, while sick would be to not have a job. Disability seems a bit extreme for allergies (and no, nothing really controls it well... lortadine does help though).
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'm guilty of coming to work with a cold because our sick days come out of the same pool as our vacation days and I like to save those up for when it's sunny out and I'm feeling good.
Tim Olshansky doesn't have Page's money, so he'll have to settle for trying to get it through people's thick heads that they really have to stay home when they're sick. 'Why do people still come to the office when they're coughing up a lung?'
Only one answer to that, government legislation!
That's not the choice we were talking about. Only about using up vacation days in lieu of spreading sickness. I'd be a heck of a lot more sympathetic with someone whose job was in jeopardy rather than their tan on the beach.
Your little petri-dish crotch-droppings already snotted all over everything when you went shopping with them because they got sent home sick you sanctimonious prick.
If I get sick, there's nothing I can do about it, and if I am going to be miserable, I might as well be miserable at work.
Wash your fucking hands with soap and water every time you go to the restroom or before you eat and you won't get sick so much.
One bout of flu in 28 years since college, and NO FLU SHOTS the entire time ... because I wash my fucking hands!
...we all know that vaccinating against harmless diseases like the flu actually weakens resistance in the long term, and may give a selective benefit to other diseases.
Don't let big companies fool you: they are not after your long term health, but only after a short term benefit to their shareholder value.
Everyone seems to suggest that the main reason for staying home is to not spread the illness. I'd say a better reason would be because it's just healthy for you.
When you have the flue, your body fights that by upping your body temperature. Your body won't really like it, but the flue will definitely not like it. Then the weakened flue virus can be easier cleaned up.
But you have to support your body to keep at something like 39 degrees Celcius. Put the room thermostat higher, or just crawl in bed with lots of blankets. Anything to stay warm.
Staying at an office all day long, with minimal room temperature, often next to a windy door or window is not a good idea and won't really improve your situation. Your body will have to work real hard to get at a high temperature and to get rid of the virus.
Anyway, I was just sick this week. Today is my first good day again :).
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Seattle has enacted mandatory sick time and paid time off. For me this puts my combined vacation time, sick time and personal time cap at around 216 hours (though, I'm not sure what the accrual rate is anymore). Combined with very flexible WFH policies, I haven't seen a sick person at work in quite some time.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
I don't give two shits about my co-workers health. If they don't want to get sick, maybe they should take a day off.
Seriously, your co-worker should take off a day to avoid getting your plague? So I guess you also don't care if co-worker Foobar makes you and everyone else at your workplace sick, since by symmetry Foobar shouldn't give two shits about anyone else's health either. Or are you somehow special? Golden rule much?
The company I work for doesn't offer sick leave but they do let you work from home. Most people work from home if they are mildly sick.
A lot of companies offer free flu shots. Then again, I know one person who tested positive for influenza recently who had gotten a flu shot, so I wonder if the shot is not very good this year. The whole flu shot thing is just a guess made months ago about which viruses were likely to be prevalent this year.
I work mainly by contract and many people work hourly. If we do not show up for work we don't get paid. We have no sick days or vacation days. The people who are working paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet are going to be in big trouble if their take home pay is cut 22% because they had to take a week off work
My wife's employer (a large hospital no less) requires that you notify your manager 24 hours in advance of any absence to include illness. If you don’t you cannot take PDO (Paid Day Off) and do not get paid for the day. Do it three times in a year and you are gone.
No good deed goes unpunished.
When I worked and I was sick, i would call up and it would go like this. "I can't make it to work today, I'm not feeling well" I'd say. "If you want to keep you job, you better get your ass to work." Is what they'd reply back.
Be seeing you...
I once worked for a small manufacturing company with some big clients. Flu shots for employees were mandatory, unless their doctor said otherwise, and were provided FREE by the company. It was the first time I ever saw a company with this policy. It has since become a regular policy in other companies where I have worked.
The year before I worked there, the attitude of management was very antagonistic towards employees who called in sick. Management had the stance that employees were using sick time to avoid work and were lazy, unproductive workers. One employee called in sick with the flu over several days and his manager didn't believe him. So the manager made him report to work the next day. So, the employee, still sick, reported for work.
As can be expected, a few days later, workers in the company began dropping like flies as the flu spread through the ranks. By the end of the week, every employee except three became ill and could not report to work. Including the CEO. The company's production, management, and business was completely shut down for three weeks. The three who were still on were low-level employees who had neither the authority or skill to do anything in the company to keep production going or even send out what product was ready to be packaged and shipped.
The three employees who did not become ill were the only three in the company who had gotten flu shots.
The damage didn't end there. This small company produced a key component for a seasonal product sold by a major company in the US. Without this component, the client could not produce their own product. This mini-epidemic occurred just as the small company needed to ramp up their production in order for their client to ramp up their production to meet the coming seasonal demand. (This is an event that shows the serious flaw in Just-In-Time manufacturing.) So, not only could this small company not produce the item their client needed, it seriously jeopardized their client's critical production period. Their client, in a panic, had to turn to another company to produce this part.
Not only did this company have production shutdown for all their clients for three weeks, they lost a huge account with a very important client. They had to fight to get this client to give them another chance the next year and had to accept unfavorable terms in the new contract. There was similar damage to some contracts with their smaller clients. All this resulted in extended business losses for the company, not just three weeks of production! This damage continied on in a few rounds of layoffs over the next couple of years, one of which got me cut from the company.
The new policy at the company when I started was all employees will have flu shots, provided for free by the company, and anyone who even thought they were sick was to call in and stay away until they were over whatever bug hit them. They were still trying to regain lost business and repair damage to their reputation when I came into the company. When I learned the story behind the company's "progressive" sick policy, it was estimated that the company had permanently lost a third of its clientele and they were fighting to retain another third.
Fifteen years after all this happened, this company is still around, but I estimate they are less than half the size what they were when I worked for them. A combination of the flu shutdown and the flow of manufacturing jobs being sent to China was nearly the death-blow for this company. They sold off buildings and facilities in order to stay afloat. A lot of very hard lessons are all wrapped up in this story.
All this damage because of just one manager ordering one sick employee to report to work.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
After being out 3 days sick, we need a Doctors' note to prove we weren't 'faking' or we won't be paid for the days off.
USA: Still Puritan After All These Years.
every single boss and manager I've had, EVERY SINGLE ONE, has been one of two types:
the type that would brag about how they NEVER get sick and _neither_should_you_
or the type that took perverse pride in coming in no matter how sick they were and expect the same of his staff (and this type have all been males)
in my current job we've only just having some success ing trying to break that culture, which is particularly important as there are several workers with young children who seem to pick up every bug and germ and pass it on to their parents who have been in the habit of coming in sick and then passing it on to their coworkers effectively increasing not just the total number of absentee days per year but often causing concurrent absenteeism which can be murder for those left behind in the office when your team has already been repeatedly down sized by budget cuts / corporate politics.
Observed behavior.
I work in a field that is highly amenable to working from home. I know this because I do it quite frequently, as our current office pretty much sucks (and not just because they've fallen for the collaborative workspace fad). You'll note that this also means I'm working for a company that is highly amenable to working from home. It's something they encourage, although I admit it hasn't been long enough to judge whether or not this will effect long-term career path.
In spite of all of this, I'm seeing (when there) and hearing about (when not) people coming in sick. Some of them are extra nice, and bring in sick kids, too, which is ever such a joy (especially thanks to that collaborative workspace horseshit).
So, in conditions just about as conducive to not going in to work sick as possible, I still see it happening regularly. People almost never stay home when sick, despite great working-from-home access, much less actually take time off when sick.
It's hard to read this as anything other than free choice on their part.
fic Method .....
The other day I responded to a blog post, which cited a web site owned by a marketing director at Eli Lilly --- pushing vaccines. I was attacked by a gaggle of illiterates, responding with the typical drivel when facts are presented: conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory!
This is no response to facts presented, this is the response of illiterates with zero comprehension of the scientific method, or science for that matter. Simply claiming there a plenty of studies, without being familiar with research protocols ain't science, dood!
Instead, what they nimrods and f**kwits are doing is worshipping corporatism; that is, they blindly believe everything and anything the corporation does is sacrosanct --- they are exhibiting the mindless, fanatical behavior of the religionists!
Certainly, vaccines which have been suitably tested and vetted, manufactured under strict rules, and marketed honestly (something Eli Lilly was found guilty of, BTW) are to be recommended --- but the criminal corporations which exist today have a horrendous record of selling deadly crap, which they then don't have to own up to.
The two successful campaigns waged over the past 3 to 4 decades has been to confuse people about the ownership of the banks, oil companies, pharmaceuticals and munitions makers, while somehow convincing the masses to worship the corporation.
...this sounds to me, as a European. When we are sick, we simply stay at home. A social insurance we obligedly contribute to pays the salary, after the first three days ( which, at least in Austria, the country I live in, are paid for by the employer, as regulated by law and trade-union agreements ). The tone of TFA seems like coming from another planet...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
If you work at google as a contractor as I did, you cannot work remotely. Their security team has decided that email and other services should be inaccessible to temporary workers outside of a google run network. Just fyi.
The problem in the US isn't just that vacation and sick leave are combined. The total is usually less. It is a slight of hand that management uses to reduce time off while making it look like they offer more. There is usually not enough time to get sick, handle unexpected situations, and fit in a actual vacation. That leaves two solutions
1) Give up on the idea of a real vacation and accept that an extended weekend is the best you are going to get.
2) Don't take sick days
..."Because unfortunately, there is a still a strong perverse culture that equates staying at home when sick with weakness. This is a flawed belief and should be questioned."
It's because employers in the US (most of them) are slave driving assholes who don't care if you're sick, you get your ass to work and make your masters their money! Not many places offer sick days, and even if they do they'd rather you "tough it out" and come to work.
It's an incredibly ignorant POV but i don't see it changing anytime soon. Making more money is more important than your easily replaceable selfs health.
Not sure I'd put much stock in a blog that has no meaningful feedback. Yes random posters can be terrible people, but this guy's so off-base on the real problem with the working sick in America that his blog just begs for some commentary. The issue is far less about me being malicious and coming in to work sick when I shouldn't, but rather about my company's policy of firing those who take more than two sick days in a row, or refusing to pay sick time for a Monday or Friday, and assuming that no employee is ever sick until absolute proof is provided. Employers need to meet us halfway. When you're business culture is predicated on a paranoid assumption that employees are at best marginally more trustworthy than chain gang criminals or war prisoners, then that's sort of the root problem, not any American ethic about "looking weak."
If I'm sick and want to stay home, I have to take a vacation day. You can bet that if I'm able to drag my sorry butt out of bed and drive, that I'll be in work, infecting everyone around me if I have to.
When I started at my second job, I got sick at the second week or so. I could not take any sick day or vacation since I don't have much accumulated yet. Because I was on H1-B visa, I would violate the immigration law if I take unpaid time off. So the choice would be between coming in work sick or deportation. It is an easy decision.
The majority of part time workers don't get paid sick days in america (73%). Even 25% of full time workers don't get a single paid sick day. The problem then, is much bigger than telling people to stay home.
My company not only doesn't encourage people to stay home when sick, they discourage it by imposing serious attendance penalties.
Here in the USA companies are going to PAT time which means your sick time comes from your vacation.
The company says it the other way around - "you get to take any unused sick days as vacation, aren't we nice?"
But obviously, if you are sick as hell, you only have two choices:
1) Stay home, be sick, get one less vacation day to enjoy while you're healthy.
2) Go to work, infect everyone, do your job poorly, enjoy your well earned vacation.
Wages are flat or dropping, staffing is dwindling while workloads increase, the CEO / company owner class of society is getting richer while everyone else struggles more and more, so which choice is the average wage slave going to make?
Two employees in our hallway got sick with serious respiratory infections and spread them to the rest of us. Since PTO is my vacation time I came in every day while I was sick because I didn't want to lose any vacation time with my family. The infections lasted 2-months and spread to other people in the department.
We work at a very large healthcare company, we have mandatory flu shots, we have a work from home policy 1-day a week, and a 2-hours in the office and rest of the day from home sick time policy. None of these did any good since we had to show up at the office or lose PTO and vacation time.
PTO is P.O.S. for the employees but great for the company who can limit complete time off from work.
Last company and industry I worked for that isn't healthcare had unlimited sick days and they were not abused because the salaried people at those levels were mature enough not to abuse them and the ones that did were dealt with swiftly in that cut-throat industry.
American policies towards employees have been degrading steadily and pushing the quality of life, work, and enjoyment down steadily.
People here keep saying that it is financial, but that is only part of it. How many times have you woken up sick as a dog and then through the miracle of medicate feel 1/2 way alright by 10am? I know I go to work sick when that is the case as it is not worth the hassle to catch up from what I missed the day I am off. This is the reason why many Americans don't take all their vacation (if they are white collar workers - don't have the links to the numbers at my finger tips).
There is no redundancy built into the system at work that one person's job, they are responsible for tasks, and if they are not done "THAT DAY" then things go wrong for them. Deadlines are missed, backroom promises are broken, etc. I cannot tell you the number of times I went to work sick as I had a change to do, that I waited a month for approval for just to get implemented and if I missed my "window" I would have to redo all the change effort and approvals.
Bad policies, bad redundancy, bad management are all the reason why people come to work sick.
Even though I'm sick enough today to be physically incapable of speaking, I have a fever, and my head hurts badly. Today is already a half-day for me.
At my company, I get 10 days of PTO per year, and both vacation and sick days come out of that. My health is such that I've only had 3 days of actual vacation in the last 2 years, and this year, my sick days may go into unpaid days.
LOL. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/04/27/flu-vaccine-not-effective-in-elderly/
Still, let's just keep taking the snake oil!
Dr Hadwen revealed the fraud that was Jenner, almost 100 years ago, still NOBODY has ever refuted his talks. Why is that?
http://www.whale.to/v/hadwen1.html
Seriously. You have an office nurse -- when that awesome hard-working devoted staffer comes in looking green, you send them straight to the office nurse. Who tells them they're an idiot and sends them home.
That way all the boxes have been checked off. Everyone knows the staffer didn't pull a sick day for a different reason, and the staffer's personal-pride in doing a good job is intact.
I watched dad do this over decades. He was an only-child who grew up in the bush where you did everything yourself because you had to, healthy or sick. He never called-in if he could drag himself to the car. And got sent right back by the nurse. Where he'd go straight to bed and rested till better because that was now his job-task.
The office nurse easily pays for themselves in this position. If your office is really too small for that, then the manager has to do it. Greet everyone in the morning, send home anyone that seems infectious. Basic job task.
When a chiropractor told me about vitamin D being a good option to potentially prevent colds and the flu, I was skeptical, but being the sciency-kinda-guy in my house, I experimented with it. I took some guidance online about maximum dosages (cuz you can OD on the stuff over time), and I started using it daily. I always got annoyed at getting sick after I got the flu shot (I am a nerd who gets sick quite easily), and have always had longer illness times than most people. Well, after using citamin D in a manner that wasn't going to kill me, I was able to eliminate or drastically shorten 4 out of the 5 colds/flus I would likely contract in a year. So I'd be taking my daily 3000IUs per day, and once people around me started getting sick, I upped it to my daily max dose (only in fall, winter, and spring) so I could get max benefit from it. I got my skeptical wife to try, and she saw benefits the first time she was getting sick... drastically reduced or eliminated her flu, and she was a believer. Now my son takes it every day... my son was away 60+ days from school last year (in grade 1), and he's only had 5 days away in grade 2. Last year by this time, he had over 30 days absent. Life is certainly better at my house.
In short, I know my body is still fighting whatever bug I get, and since my body fights it more effectively with healthy vitamin D levels. Do your own research, but I like it and what it's done for not just me, but for my wife and son too. The jury is still out on the scientific study front (in fact some studies show less of an impact), but for me, I work indoors and get less sunlight than most people based on where I live. Vitamin D seems to help me get what I need to deal with those nasty bugs more effectively.
I only have 5 sick days a year, and a bad flu can last 2-3 days. If I get sick more than a couple times a year, I’ll have to go to the doctor’s office and get a note, which means spending the entire day out and doing crap anyway. So rather than not getting paid and running around (or sitting around in the waiting room, rather than resting), I’d rather just go to work and get paid.
It's hard to convince yourself to stay home when you know your company is relying on something so inane as the Bradford Factor to decide if you're a lazy-ass. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_Factor)
That was what my last employer thought about 'sick' people. 'Sick' == 'Lazy Shiftless bastard', who, if they try it again, should find themselves looking for work elsewhere. Also, sick meant you had to bring in a doctors note. It didn't matter what you had, but it had to be proven, otherwise your were faking, and subject to termination. I made other people sick by bringing in hacking cough (they saved money by lowering the temperature in the building), and people had to wear coats, it was colder than 10C inside, and where I worked was close to a truck loading bay with doors wide open for up to 30 minutes at a time (the outside air was much colder than 10C). I've worked in other places too, where it was very cold in winter, very hot in summer. As an example, the temperature was 15C in winter (no truck loading bay but sitting in front of a computer its quite cool), and same office, 95F (sorry not in metric) in summer. No air, no heat, no fun. And the technical requirements were long, and the compensation was 50% lower than industry average, and I don't work there anymore. Surprise!
18 months ago, I had a heart attack while at work (April 1, 2011). It was a Friday afternoon, and after having a stent put in, was released Sunday afternoon (I'm a relatively healthy guy in my early 40s, and even the doctors said my case was an outlier). While my wife ran to the pharmacy to get my new drugs, I fired up my iPad and started working. I was in the middle of a big project, and needed to get it done. When she got home, she was pissed. Just a few months ago, another guy at work (in his 60s) had a knee replacement, and was helping trouble-shoot equipment problems from his hospital bed via cellphone just hours after the surgery. This is a sick fucking world.
I've been working sick for about ten days now, and some ridiculous sense of pride has nothing to do with it. I get paid hourly, and calling out means I lose a precious day's worth of pay. If I called out every day for the past two weeks, I'd be sick, broke, AND looking for a new job.
I don't give two shits about my co-workers health. If they don't want to get sick, maybe they should take a day off.
Seriously, your co-worker should take off a day to avoid getting your plague? So I guess you also don't care if co-worker Foobar makes you and everyone else at your workplace sick, since by symmetry Foobar shouldn't give two shits about anyone else's health either. Or are you somehow special? Golden rule much?
Well, didn't he spell it out. He doesn't care if he's sick, he'll still come to work.
And in any case, keeping bad enough personal hygiene will have most external germs eaten before they have a chance to infect you, not to mention it will keep co-workes far enough to make infection unlikely. Washing hands before eating and going to toilet will help too. Staying healthy is just a matter having the right attitude! ;)
We also can get fired or otherwise disciplined for taking too many days off when we're sick.
Coincidentally, my grown daughter, who lives with my ex-wife, just now called me about this very thing. Evil-X has had a few eye surgeries lately (nasty ones) and my daughter told me her mom is driving her crazy because X is getting fired for missing too much work because of the surgeries, despite having worked there the last seven years.
I told my daughter to tell her mom to talk to a lawyer. I don't know if it will do any good.
Free Martian Whores!
I live in Europe. Isn't being "sick" and "showing up for work" a contradiction in terms ?
I work in the IT dept of a major health system, and 3 days ago I was (unknowingly) standing next to someone who came into work sick (not one of my coworkers, but an end-user). When her coworker told her to go home and stop infecting everyone else, she said that, "She couldn't afford it."
So, basically, she gets to go into work and not be adversely affected financially by her illness, based on the premise that whoever else she infects can afford it (or will be as selfish as she is and infect those that she didn't infect).
That woman is a selfish cunt.
If you get sick, stay the fuck home. If you can't afford to stay home, then stay the fuck home. What makes you think that, even if I can afford to stay home, I want to deal with your illness.
Here is an idea, the next time I get sick because a coworker comes into work sick and infects me, I will sue that person for pain and suffering.
If you ever wonder why the burger-flipper behind the counter at McDonalds sneezed in your burger, this is also why.
In the foodservice industry in the US, they probably don't get any paid time off at all (unless things have changed since 25 years ago when I was in it). So, their options are to call in and not be paid, incur the wrath of their manager (do it too many times and you will either be fired or won't get any hours), or just suck it up and go in.
I agree that it is stupid, but it's how it goes.
That's the part time trap. It is common in service jobs for the employers to resist allowing their employees to work full time. That is because they required to provide benefits to full-time employees but not to part time. Among those benefits are paid time off.
Most of the types of sick days I've had are things like these.
If you're coughing up a lung and spreading germs everywhere, stay the hell home (and sleep).
But there are lots of other things that make going to work not cool but doing work OK.
Those with allergies aren't contagious, but may have some fairly terrible symptoms (which often results in both sleep loss and waking discomfort). Sometimes the solution is to wake up, take a benedryl, and hit the sack for a few more hours until it takes affect and the symptoms abate.
As mentioned by the parent, being in close proximity to a toilet is also usually a good reason to stay home.
I've had a few times where I've called in and either worked remote or come in late, but still managed to get plenty of work done. Sometimes taking a whole day off is worse, because then you've got even more work waiting for you at the office.
Trouble of 1st world, I guess. I needed to work sick in all my previous jobs, since they try to fire you if you takes some days for a flu. Or in the best case they discount the days or the whole week.
Because lots of people don't get sick days, and no work equals no pay. Where I work, 3 sick days a year were eliminated a few years ago. Recent layoffs now mean I am literally the last man standing in my department, which is a critical cog in a production wheel. If I stay home there is nobody to do the work and I end up coming in anyway.
I simply dope up, gulp cough syrup with codeine, and stay away from people as much as possible. I have no other alternative except unemployment.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I'm an auto technician at a dealership. As a whole, technicians are paid on flat rate, meaning we get paid based on how many billable hours we flag per day. Many of us do not have a guaranteed pay, though thankfully, in California, employers are mandated by law to pay us double the minimum wage if we provide our own tools, which we have to do in order to do our jobs.
Most dealer technicians, like myself, are not granted many sick days, if at all. I get two per year worked. If I want to make money, I have to be there, fixing cars and producing billable hours. Most of the time I have cut my losses and stayed home when I'm sick, but I have gone to work a few times sick as a dog, simply because I could not afford not to go to work. During those times, I was doing oil changes, tire rotations, and other jobs that require a decent amount of conscientiousness and attention to detail. All in order to flag MAYBE six hours in a nine hour shift (A lot of techs work through lunch).
Ask yourself, do you want an auto technician doing a tire rotation on your car when his head feels like it's full of ten pounds of fluid, and has a pounding headache, and may or may not remember to torque those wheels? This is what happens quite frequently at repair shops due to the flat rate system, simply because the techs cannot afford to miss even one day of work. It's compounded even worse by employers who look at the "dedication" of their technicians, and cut the allowed sick time because of it. Or greed. Mostly greed.
You want to stop the spread of infection and illness, start treating people like human beings and let them stay home without having to worry about making a buck once in a while.
At my work, we have "unlimited sick days" -- however, we are encouraged to work from home those days if we are up to it. If we show up sick to the office, just about everyone tries to kick you out and go home. There is never the feeling or pressure of "I must work this day even though I'm sick." It is more the feeling of "I really want to get some code out today even though I'm sick." I know there is the sentiment on ./ that you should not go over and beyond for your work for they will not do that for you, but our work really does do a lot for its employees.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Here in Japan, there is no concept of paid sick leave. You can take an unpaid holiday if you like (and are able), or come to work and infect whoever. You can guess what the masses choose to do.
If you're physically unable to even get to work - maybe you've been hospitalized following a serious injury - then, after one week and with a report from a doctor nominated (and paid) by your employer, you can be dismissed for being unfit to work. This would allow one to access unemployment benefits or employment insurance but the fact remains that in Japan, being seriously ill or injured is legally considered a terminable offence! Whether you are actually fired or not is up to your employer.
And there's the rub - to stay in their employer's good books, everyone makes sure to look like they're working hard - and you can't do that if you're not in the office, influenza be damned. Indeed the very concept of sick leave seems strange to your typical, unenlightened Japanese. So people come to work no matter what, the viruses keep spreading, and the cycle perpetuates. All the while, manufacturers of "surgical" masks make a mint.
You can bet your last dollar Japan isn't going to get sick leave for a very, very long time. Be grateful that you can stay home if you're sick!
It's inspiring to see how many comments are now reusing the fitting term "wage slavery." I'm glad I inspired that in my past AC comments and to see it now spreading.
For me, it was emphasized by Chomsky.
Good for Larry, but I do hope the vaccination isn't Pandemrix.
The GlaxoSmithKline's Pandemrix vaccine caused narcolepsia in a number of young adults in the Nordic countries. I.e. the vaccines were impacting the sleep-wake regulation in the brain - a flu vaccine with severe neurological side effects!
With the vaccine, probability of narcolepsy jumped up 9 times. The Swedish authorities recommend children and young adults under 20 to not be vaccinated with Pandemrix.
I'm all for vaccination, but let's not try to beta test with unsuspecting people. We have medical trials for these sorts of things. Pandemrix was evaluated against bird flu but not swine flu.
PS. The stupidest part of the whole thing? The governments pay, via a special medical insurance fund, to the people who were impacted by narcolepsy. In my opinion, the money should come from GlaxoSmithKline, and not from tax payers. Fucking things up on this scale should be made so costly that it will not be done again!
I've worked in the food service industry my whole life. I can say with absolute certainty that most every food handler comes into work when they are sick. This happens largely for two reasons. The first is a lack of paid sick days. The second is that a lot of restaurants really struggle to operate when they are short handed. It's not like an office where some (if not all) of the work can just be left for tomorrow. People who show up today really want to eat today, so there is a lot of pressure to make it in, even if you're sick.
ummm I go to work when I'm sick because I need the money....It has nothing to do with some weird cultural stigma about being weak..
Thank you for that helpful comment. As an American (I assume that's the shithole you meant), it caused me to completely reassess my priorities. Now, thanks to your wisdom, I see the light. I'll be emigrating to Australia, where some people may be absolute assholes, but by golly, they stick up for their rights.
Don't want you to come in when you're sick, but also punish you when you miss work--their implied orders are "If you get sick, you're fired."
Maybe your body just doesn't know how to fight disease anymore. Maybe if fewer people weren't such germphobes things like the flu wouldn't be as bad.
Your adaptive immune system (the part that's really used to fight viruses) doesn't work that way. It's essentially tantamount to a huge set of random number generators, almost like a lottery. It's constantly generating immune cells with random detection trigger patterns. If one finds a "hit" then it rapidly clones itself to mount an attack against the invader and some of those cells become very long-lived "memory cells" in case the exact same invader ever returns. Much like a lottery, the overwhelming preponderance of the immune cells never find a hit and then automatically die off in a few days or weeks to be replaced by a new set of randomly generated cells. Vaccines work because of the memory effect of the adaptive immune system.
So, while constant exposure to a variety of infectious agents increases the memory "blacklist", it doesn't necessarily confer any prospective protection against new challengers. The flu mutates constantly as part of an evolutionary arms race against the population's immunity memory. This is why there are new flu vaccines created every year in an attempt to get ahead of the new mutations before they promulgate.
One interesting thing I've read is the concept that flu season is typically in winter, which correlates with lower sun exposure->reduced vitamin D. Vitamin D is a known powerful immune system modulator. Hm, seems there is even a Wikipedia page about it now: Vitamin D and influenza . Of particular note is that even if you were to stand naked in the middle of the day in downtown Boston in January, the incident UV from the sun would be insufficient to generate any appreciable amount of vitamin D. The same is *not* true for summer in the same locale, and equatorial populations have sufficient solar exposure to generate vitamin D year-round. Either way, taking 2,000–5,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily during winter is cheap and doesn't have much in the way of adverse reactions.
Earth to Larry Page. Paging Mr Page. Okay enough jokes now for the serious stuff.
1) If you want kids to not get the seasonal influenza virus then give them vitamin D3 and blood tests so they accurately know their level of this crucial hormone! It is far more effective and much safer. There is no anti-vitaminD3 campaign (yet) so there is no resistance.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21036090
2) The seasonal influenza vaccine is not anywhere near as effective as advertised.
- Cochrane Review
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004879/vaccines-for-preventing-influenza-in-healthy-children
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults-
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005187/influenza-vaccination-for-healthcare-workers-who-work-with-the-elderly
- Dr Lisa Jackson's out of season influenza vaccine research
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/2/337.short
Please read those reviews with an open mind. The doctors and researchers doing the reviews at cochrane.org are not anti-vax. In fact they have a high opinion of most vaccinations. They also see no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. So for them to be critical of the seasonal influenza vaccine and its lack of effectiveness is something that needs to be addressed.
Another problem that should be addressed is kids being sent to school or daycare when sick. The daycare and school should just put the sick kids in a room and call the parents to come an pick them up. Nobody should be dumping sick kids on schools and daycare centers.
A very dumb decision by that manager to be sure. However if they really want to prevent people from getting sick give all the employees and their family free vitamin D3. It is cheaper, safer and way more effective than the vaccine.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21036090
2) The seasonal influenza vaccine is not anywhere near as effective as advertised.
- Cochrane Review
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004879/vaccines-for-preventing-influenza-in-healthy-children
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults-
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005187/influenza-vaccination-for-healthcare-workers-who-work-with-the-elderly
- Dr Lisa Jackson's out of season influenza vaccine research
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/2/337.short
Please read those reviews with an open mind. The doctors and researchers doing the reviews at cochrane.org are not anti-vax. In fact they have a high opinion of most vaccinations. They also see no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. So for them to be critical of the seasonal influenza vaccine and its lack of effectiveness is something that needs to be addressed.
In Czech republic the first three days of being sick are not paid by employee. That's why people go to work even if they have a cold. Stupid law.
Vitamin D3 is a fat soluble vitamin. It is also toxic in higher quantities and since it is fat soluble the excess is not flushed from your system like you get with vitamin C.
You can have some D3 but people that take those 5000IU capsules every day are idiots and are heading for some major damage in their bodies. If you get no sunlight at all, don't drink milk, eat dairy products like yogurt, or other stuff fortified with vitamin D then some amount would be useful. However if you are outside in the sun for even 30 minutes that is enough.
Mostly the seasonal flu vaccine is not very effective because of guessing. It is better than nothing at all but still a guess. They can immunize against 3 or so strains of the flu, if you are hit with one of those strains you are probably okay, if not you are going to get sick.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Had one time where I was sick, came in to work, and my boss ended up sending him home 5 hours early because of how sick I was. Luckily this was right before my days off. So by the time my next work day rolled around I was pretty much fine.
Until I was told that I HAD to use five of my vacation hours to fill in my schedule. This wasn't a choice on my part, and I hadn't been told that before either. If I had I would have stayed at work at gotten everyone sick, or stayed at home and use 10 hours of vacation time, rather then come in at all.
Of course, this is the same company that when I asked about Holiday pay, the CEO himself told me that because I'd already have 40 hours for the week, and that I didn't normally work on the days that I was asking about Holiday pay for, that I wasn't going to get it. Luckily his niece (who does pay roll), gave her Uncle a piece of her mind, and everyone got their Holiday pay (though my coworker didn't fare well. He WAS suppose to work the days, and working a holiday gets you 8 hours of holiday pay, plus time + 1/2 of for your regular hours, the CEO didn't want to pay, so told him not to even bother coming in, and to use his vacation hours (that are earned through the year, so first year you can earn up to 1 week, second year you can earn up to 2 weeks, third year you can earn up to three weeks... which ends up being the highest you can earn subsequently).
So my company doesn't even have something called PTO (Paid Time Off), we have 'Vacation Hours Earned', and you HAVE to use it if you get sick. You cannot choose to just have an unpaid sick day. You best believe that I am coming in EVERY single dang time I'm sick (even if that means that on the eventual drive home, I have to pull over and start throwing up into a trash can).
My friends work is much better. Not only does she have Sick Days, but also Vacation Days, Holiday's which the business is closed, time and a half Sundays, but also... if for whatever reason you use EVERYTHING up that you've earned, you can still get sick days. They won't be paid, but they won't fire you (and there is no fear of it) either. Last she told me, everything she doesn't use carries over into the next year. I've never thought I'd want to leave an almost salary job for a grocery job.
Manufacturing is a jobb for robots that's increasingly being done by robots. Sick time doesn't come into it.
You haven't been in a lot of manufacturing plants have you? I've been in manufacturing for better than 25 years and run a manufacturing plant for my day job. Even in heavily automated plants there still are lots of people working there and telecommuting will remain impossible for most them. It is true that manufacturing, like farming 100 years ago, will be done by a smaller percentage of the population, but that percentage is still going to be large and those people will still need to be at their factories to do their jobs. That isn't going to change any time soon. Same for health care, retail, food service, transportation and many other industries.
Even if we accept your premise (and I do not) that "manufacturing is a job for robots" a huge percentage of manufacturing work cannot be easily automated for purely economic reasons. In most cases automation only makes financial sense for relatively high volumes of product when labor is relatively expensive because robots aren't cheap nor is the expertise to make them work. The reason we don't have more automation isn't due to technical limitations, it is due to economic ones.
Sure, with enough money it is possible to automate many tasks but that does not mean it can be done at a profit. I'll give you an example. My company makes wire harnesses. We could theoretically automate the process for our biggest product with a robot and vision system that would cost north of $1 million once you account for all the costs. That would be almost half our annual revenue (not profits, revenue). Or we can spend about $60,000 on a couple of hand presses and have workers operate them. Our biggest product sells for about $4 each and we produce about 150,000 of them a year. It would take us about 10 years to recoup the cost of the automation and we have a 5 year contract on production. In other words we'd never see a dime of profit if we were dumb enough to automate this production. Robots simply are not an economic option for many, many tasks.
If you work with people face-to-face in any job, the argument remains: you'll do more harm spreading your disease than the good you'll do by coming in.
Tell that to a single mother earning $20K per year in an hourly job where if she doesn't come in she doesn't get paid and therefore can't pay the bills. Tell that to the small business owner with a critical delivery of products that gets missed because his employee called in sick. Is the view nice from your ivory tower?
Because I have 4 sick days a year so I only take them if I have, say, the plague; end of story. I'm not taking unpaid time I don't have to because that hurts ME.
Everybody comes into work sick sometimes. There are the times we feel slightly ill, stuffy, the times we aren't experiencing any symptoms at all. Everybody has gone to work while contagious with a virus.
If we all stayed home any time we were infected with anything it would add up to a lot of sick days. So why do we value perfect health so much? Why do some people consider it so heinous to become ill? Humans possess an immune system and becoming ill is an intrinsic part of life on Earth.
I am NOT in the US, and have the luxury of having either worked for myself, or hundreds of miles from direct supervision, for 30 years, so I have never had the yoke of supervision be an issue. I have been very lucky, as in my case, I only had to make sales and profit targets - everything else was irrelevant - take as much or as little vacation time as I liked, sick days when I wanted - just make the magic happen... (that said, I also have no corporate or government pensions of any sort, but I suspect many that are the subjects of these discussions do not either)
The stories of giving up vacation for sick time, and losing jobs for time off, are even sadder given that the demographic on this website is likely better off than the average US worker.
Corporations rule only when the populations say that they may. As long as the population will be distracted by cake and circuses (Games, Celebrities, Sports, or other trivial matters), the rape will continue.
For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward.
What is the exact reason you think that you need all of your people actually nose to muzzle on a day to day basis??
Because we make tangible physical products and not intangible computer code. Pretty much impossible to assemble or ship a product without multiple bodies actually being present. Pretty hard for a waitress to deliver your food from her house. Very difficult for the truck driver to deliver your box without coming to your place of business.
ould it be worth it to pay US$1000 and then US$295 a month for a meeting place that is world accessable runs 24/7 and does not have the problems of folks making each other sick??
No because it would be useless to us. Maybe it would work for what you do but for most people being at the office or plant actually matters.
No sick days? Where I live in socialist scandinavia everybody have 13 sick days per year, + the one with kids get 10 sick days extra to stay home when their kids are sick. You can stay home 3 days in a row without going to the doctor, and recive 100% pay. If you are sick for longer periods you got to go to the doctor and get his approval to stay home longer, but these days are not substracted from the sick days. In addition comes 5 weeks of holliday.