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Hundreds of Walmart Employees Say They've Been Punished For Taking Sick Days (vice.com)
A new report from the workers advocacy group A Better Balance alleges that Walmart consistently punishes employees for taking sick days, even if they have proper documentation from doctors. From a report: A Better Balance interviewed and surveyed more than 1,000 Walmart workers about the company's absence control program -- which awards disciplinary "points" for absences regardless of reason -- and found the retail giant to be in violation of multiple laws. "Giving a worker a disciplinary 'point' for being absent due to a disability or for taking care of themselves or a loved one with a serious medical condition is not only unfair," the report reads, "in many instances, it runs afoul of federal, state, and local laws." Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove told the Times that the allegations are false, and that the company "understand[s] that associates may have to miss work on occasion," and that they "have processes in place to assist them." The report's worker testimonials say differently. "I came down with a stomach flu and I had to call in due to vomiting and high fever and got a point cause of being sick," recalls an Illinois employee named Veronica. "I hate the fact we got to worry about getting fired cause we caught the flu."
There seems to be an inconsistency, on the one hand they are employees and on the other they are associates. Which is it really?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Those with bootstraps don't get sick, you should all learn from them!
Walmart treats employees like shit...I'm deeply shocked.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
prescriptive linguistics done school you. Whomst'd've taught you languaging?
It means that maybe someone should investigate to see if it's true. Let us know when it's more than an agenda-driven allegation. Thanks.
That explains why I get sick when I go to Walmart. Having sick employees around the food and products I buy.. I am gonna have a bad time...
You are a dick. I take sick days when a doctor gives me a note saying I need a sick day. Like for having a major operation under full anesthesia that last for another day. Or for when being contagious with actual flu. Or when I had to stay in for observation. Then again I am from Europe and you can't take a sick day without a doctor's note saying you are sick and you or the public health require that you isolate yourself from the public. Sick days without a doctor's note are a problem in the US, but because of your broken health system it is impossible to get same day appointments for acute conditions
they will point you no matter the reason then if they dont like you they will try to add on points for no reason i rember in my entire stay there i missed 1 day and they tried to say i had 6 points. they also play favrets to people who kiss there ass vs those that do not. just me if that company can brake a labor law they do.
Walmart is scum. News at 11.
Unfortunately the masses of Trump voters are too desperate to put food on their tables and cannot vote with their feet to move to a "better" job, despite the incredibly low bar Wallmart presents, and they are religiously committed to hating unions, so will not organize or offer any other form of self-defense or even resistance.
Fodder is the word that comes to mind.
It says so right above the non-compete clause
If you post it, they will read.
This falls under the "stuff that matters" part of the slogan.
A good lesson for all the kids out there. Learn proper grammar.
If WalMart introduces grammar screening for their "associates", they're going to alienate a lot of their labor pool. Actually that goes for a lot of places - Proper grammar seems to be a rarity. Not everyone talks as goodly as you and I.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove told the Times that the allegations are false, and that the company "understand[s] that associates may have to miss work on occasion," and that they "have processes in place to assist them.
Randy is a Liar. I was a Sam's Club Manager and they look for ANY Reason to let a Employee Go if it does not benefit the store or club. This also includes finding excuses to get rid of employees that work hard and get up to a too high a pay cost. So we are told to reward hard work with betrayal all based on a 25 cent cost per hour cost increase
There was an article a couple days ago about how white-collar employees in the US are afraid of using their vacation time...this seems like a good bookend to that. The bottom line is that there are very few nice, generous employers anymore. I work for one that actually treats us pretty well; we have on-your-honor sick days and reasonable amounts of vacation. However, stores like this are necessary to show once in a while that employers will take advantage of you at any turn, and some of them are quite bad.
You see stuff like this a lot in low-margin, low-paying employers with what they consider a disposable workforce. I'm sure Amazon is guilty of this with their warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc. I guarantee that with steady jobs getting scarcer every day, and a constant narrative depicting business owners as superhuman infallible beings, nothing is going to get better. People are going to be happy to have any kind of job that gives them a steady paycheck, and that's even more true for those at the low end of the skills curve.
When I see stuff like this, it makes me wish labor unions were more powerful like they once were. Unions would never have backed down on something like this, and union members were happier because of it. All those coal miners and manufacturing workers voting last November should realize that they would have been much better off had they been represented by a strong union. Working families used to be able to survive on one income, and now that's very difficult for most people to do. I'm still hoping the pendulum swings back the other direction before things get bad enough to have another revolution or civil war on our hands in the US.
This is why many businesses just did away with sick days and gave employees free days instead of vacation, adding 5 days to their vacation time.
Now you can use those days for whatever you want.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Everybody gets sick sooner or later. Some people are fortunate enough to be on the tail end of the curve when it comes to luck, being one of them doesn't make you morally better.
Of course you might be one of those people who come to work and spread your germs around to the coworkers and customers. That doesn't make you morally better either; it makes you worse.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Walmart employees 1.4 million people in the USA.
In case anyone was wondering how we ended up with two WalMart-related front page stories so close to each other on one day...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How is unproven allegations about the sick day policy of a retailer "news for nerds"?
There is no IT angle here I can discern.
Why is this on Slashdot? Unless, of course, they're moving full steam ahead with their "All Social Justice Warrior, all the time" format.
To unsocialized neck-beards like you? Doesn't matter. To members of the Human Race? It's "Stuff That Matters".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The tagline is in the html tag of the home page so will appear in the title bar (tab in Chrome).
The fact that they have an official "absence control program" tells you just about all you need to know.
Nope, no sig
Edit box changed what I typed. It is in the HTML TITLE tag of the home page.
They exist to remove the incentive of you going to work and spreading your germs, among other things. But sick days is also a form of insurance, in which risk is pooled over the entire workforce. Statistically your compensation might end up a wash either way if you just look at the expected value but if you look at the statistical spread there is no comparison, particularly for low-paid workers who don't earn enough to put aside savings. If you're making $100,000 a year, a week without pay is nothing. If you're making $15,080 a year, it could mean losing your apartment or sending your kids to school without food.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Penalizing workers for staying home when they're sick is a really bad idea. Because, naturally, people will come to work sick rather than risk a penalty, potentially spreading the illness to other workers and to customers. This seldom ends well, either for the parties involved or for the company.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You cannot penalize people for taking time off because they're sick, the end, period, full stop. We can all empathize with the situation where someone's sick and you, as a small business -- small in the sense that we non-politicians think of as small business -- may be struggling as it is. However, we have to be sure we don't start romanticizing the gilded age, where people were considered little more than livestock.
At least some studies have suggested that paid sick leave ends up costing employers less over the long-term. If Joe is sick, let him stay home so he doesn't get everyone else sick, and then come back rested and ready to get back to work. It also helps reduce turnover. As I'm sure you know, it takes time to try to find a new employee... time that you would probably prefer to spend on other things... then there's the amount of time it takes to get that new person up to speed where they can actually output at a rate that makes you money. We're glossing over all the HR type work where you have to fill out all those lovely forms like an I-9. The whole onboarding process can be an expensive PITA, so if Joe decides to stick around because you offer paid sick leave, it's got to be quite a bit cheaper than having to hire Bob.
I worked at Stream International (outsourcing call center) about 10 years ago and you got 8 points. At 0 points they fired you. You lost points for being late, leaving early - stuff like that.
1 point per sick day - unless you had a doctors note, but 10 bucks an hour you didn't have health insurance so typically you worked sick, and you only visited the doctor if you were on deaths door.
Even after they had a tuberculosis outbreak (no I'm not kidding - the CDC got involved and required everyone to be screened) they didn't abandon this system.
My work started doing this recently. Not all that happy about it. To make matters worse, the implemented it retroactively 2 years before the program actually existed, so I'm already half way through the program. They call it "Non-disciplinary", however if you advance into the program too far you can be let go, which sounds pretty disciplinary to me. I believe I effectively do not have any sick days anymore, I'll just go to work sick from now on, unless I get hit by a bus or something, at which point work will probably be the least of my worries.
I expect it is a bargaining ploy to the Union. i.e. "You wanna get rid of it? How about those pensions?"
Though Walmart doesn't even have that I suppose.
I honestly thought this was more normal. I'm not saying it's right. However, I've worked at a software company that had a points-based attendance policy and they actually denied me a raise one year because I called off for illness a few times. It was the worst kind of phone support job and I was a lot younger but I didn't think this was unusual. I definitely thought it was unethical, though. Also stupid, as it encouraged sick people to come in and get everyone else sick, which happened all the time.
Who is doing the assigning of these "points"? Is it Management? Do the managers get assigned points when they call in sick? Who assigns the points then, other managers, or lower level workers?
If you earn 15k a year, having children is a horribly irresponsible decision that should be deferred until you can actually afford to provide for their needs. That doesn't mean "never" it means "not yet".
Yeah, because no one has ever gotten pregnant on accident or lost their job after already having children ...
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It doesn't always happen in that order: make $15K/year, then have kids.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I was written up for calling in sick, 2 days in 2 years, they called me at home about 2 hours after I called in very angry with me.
I know they where angry because at the time they where violating OSHA laws... (Having 2 employee's only in the tires shop) bringing it down to one employee for 2 hours out of a day when it was lunch time. Long story short it was really upsetting to me, they knew I was sick as a dog because I was sick for days prior (barely able to work)
I could give more examples but those are other people's stories.
Also thank god I no longer work for them, Walmart is not a good company to work for.
And non-US workers wonder why US works don't use vacation and sick days when they have them...
Companies that get caught doing this need to made an example of. Major fines. The fines can't be small enough for a business to chalk it up to the 'cost of doing business' because that's what they do already.
No good deed goes unpunished.
to tell everyone that if you couldn't find a replacement you had to come in sick. This was at a restaurant. At the time it didn't occur to anyone to call him on it, but this was the 90s so the economy was good and it wasn't enforceable.
Every call center I ever worked in had sick people non-stop. Everybody was always sick because nobody could stay home when they got sick.
This is just how it is when you work in low pay industries in a bad economy. If you want it to stop you're gonna have to pass laws, but I'm guessing most people don't want it to stop. They might be uncomfortable with the idea of sick people forced to work or be homeless but they're much more uncomfortable with paying 5% more for stuff. Especially when they're getting paid less and less just like everybody else...
Walmart's even got a phrase for it: Save Money, Live Better. You're not destroying worker solidarity and driving working families into an endless cycle of poverty. You're Saving Money, Living Better.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
they're the greatest Union Busters in the world. I wouldn't even call them pros. They've elevated it to an art. From the moment you apply to the moment you're laid off for trying to Unionize they've thought of everything.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Great. You're and entrepreneur. So add the cost of being sick into the price of providing your service. Just like employees consider paid time off when negotiating compensation. Boo hoo, the entrepreneurial risk-taker bemoans the downside of risk.
If your business is earning a profit you do.
Because the type of employees most companies want like them. If you don't offer sick days, you're stuck with the leftovers that they companies who did offer sick days passed on.
Your arguments are worth nothing if you won't put your name to them.
Your arguments are worth nothing if they fail to use some sort of basic reasoning. (hint: Not putting a name to something in of itself doesn't affect the quality or lack thereof of an argument.)
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Sounds like Walmart is sending their people to the Dwight Schrute school of management.
Jim: [to Pam] Hey.
Jim: [Dwight hands Jim a piece of paper] Oh, what's this?
Dwight: That is a demerit.
Jim: [reads demerit] "Jim Halpert, tardiness." Ugh. I love it already.
Dwight: You've gotta learn, Jim. You are second in command, but that does not put you above the law.
Jim: Oh, I understand. And I also have lots of questions, like, what does a demerit mean?
Dwight: [scoffs] Let's put it this way. You do not want to receive three of those.
Jim: Lay it on me.
Dwight: Three demerits and you'll receive a citation.
Jim: Now that sounds serious.
Dwight: Oh, it is serious. Five citations and you're looking at a violation. Four of those and you'll receive a verbal warning. Keep it up, and you're looking at a written warning. Two of those, that'll land you in a world of hurt... in the form of a disciplinary review written up by me and placed on the desk of my immediate superior.
Jim: Which would be me.
Dwight: That is correct.
Jim: OK, I want a copy on my desk by the end of the day or you will receive a full disadulation.
Dwight: What's a dis... what's that?
Jim: Oh, you don't want to know.
Season 3 - Episode 21
"Women's Appreciation"
Written by Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg
Directed by Tucker Gates
...for puking on a customer?
If you put your password between the HTML tags, Slashdot won't eat it.
Example: <title>hunter2</title>
Most of us are grown ups here. Why the hell do we need a note from the doctor saying we were really sick? I thought we left primary school years ago. The few times I had to bring a note, was for the doctor to say I was cleared for work, or if I had work restrictions. That said, my previous employer had implemented something like this. We got 5 free sick days, and could use PTO, as long as we gave a week advance notice. Other than that, we got credited 1 point for each occurrence (not day. Calling in sick for 2 days in a row for the same thing counted as 1). Show up 5 minutes late, that is a half a point. Leave early? Half a point. Once we got to 10, we're disposed of. To make shit worst, it was on a rolling calendar year; the slate doesn't get cleaned on Jan 1st, as some people found out the hard way. Who's to blame for thing? IMHO (factually unsupported, btw), both the employees and the employers.
Just because the article doesn't mention one doesn't mean there isn't one. Unless you've got a copy of the employment contract, why not assume the complaint is valid?
How are you providing value by being sick?
By staying away and not getting other employees sick, you are saving the company money.
It's also a benefit that retains better employees.
I lost seven days off when my employer combined sick and vacation. Compensatory time was unlimited, then reduced to a max of 40 hrs. It was a large municipal government and could operate with several people absent for a few days or weeks.
Being fired isn't a penalty? Because the article mentions being fired for having too many points.
But hey, since you want more details, here's how Wal-Mart's point system works (or worked about a year ago when I was dating a woman who worked for them):
If you call in at least an hour in advance...
working less than half a shift is a 1 point.
working less than a full shift but more than half is 1/2 point.
If you don't call in at least an hour in advance, being absent is 4 points.
For the first 6 months, employees are fired if they gain 4 points.
After 6 months, they're fired at 9 points in any 6 month rolling period.
Even before you reach the 4/9 point limit, however, they can assign you "coaching", which is basically a disciplinary writeup by another name. It stays in your record and can be used to justify reducing your hours, denying raises, denying promotions, etc.
I work for a government agency that has a policy of disciplining employees who use more than 3 sick days a year even though they're given 10. If you use more sick days after the first notice you can be fired.
> Even after they had a tuberculosis outbreak (no I'm not kidding - the CDC got involved and required everyone to be screened) they didn't abandon this system.
Sounds to me like that's some labor lawyer's class action lawsuit wet dream....
As i have been Recently employed at Walmart, I can verify there is a point system for absences and coachings.
Now on one hand this system seems fair for the employer,
as it keeps associates from just calling out when they feel like it and punishes them (AKA termination from employment ).
The system that is in place allows for and up to 6 points. According to them this is how it goes,
There are two types of absences:
Authorized, not part of your occurrence balance
Unauthorized, part of your occurrence balance
Late arrival or leave early = ½
absence = 1
No call/no Show = 4
3½ occurrence is the max you can have in your first 6 months (I believe it goes to six after the first 6 months )
points roll off 6 months from the date of the occurrences
Now to the other Hand, there very few Authorized occurrences types that can happen, ergo Doctor's Note,
Hospital notes from the ER, and whatever management deems (AKA kissing ass).
This not allow for other life stopping situations. Things like a Spouse or Child getting really sick and having to take care of them or your children,
a relative getting sick and you having to take care of them, your transportation breaking down (Bike, Bus, Car),
and many other small things that out of your control like your child being sent home from school and so forth.
As of this moment i personally sit at 3. one for me being sick, one for my spouse being sick and one because my child being sent home from school.
I also had to deal with a problem early on where i was working a Walmart remodel and the automated system said i missed days where i was clearly on the clock for the day. I was told one schedule and the system had me down for another. That BS made my occurences jump to 9. I had to make the managers fix it.
It took 3 different ones and HR to fix it.
Now the good old middle Finger part. If you are yelled at (AKA coaching ) for doing something wrong or stupid you get ½ of an occurrence. There is a system in place for you to fight it but that lends itself to the he said/she said problem.
This automated system works as intended to keep employees honest, But does not take into account the some of the real life problems that we deal with.
It is not perfect and has lots of room for improvement and fixes. first favoritism seems to be one of the biggest problems.
Second the human life events element seems not to be taken into account.
Do like it NO! do i understand YES! Do some people get screwed out of a job for stupid reasons YES!
As a long time reader of slashdot and recent being employed at Walmart, I Thought I would inform the conversation on the way the system works and the holes in it i see.
If you have employees and you aren't paid when you're sick, it's your own fault.
Surely you're not claiming Walmart doesn't make any money if the CEO is home sick?
Sick days exist because of people like you.
So, your driver's licence, birth certificate and credit cards all say "holophrastic".
Didn't think so.
In that case... odd how Slashdot doesn't seem to have had any coverage of the rampant civil rights violations going on at Evergreen College in Washington...
That's regional. Plus, Evergreen State has ALWAYS been wack-a-doodle.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm only seeing asterisks. Maybe because I still have mod points, but posting should sort that.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
That exposes the utter foolishness of a blanket policy like this. It encourages people to come in with communicable illnesses and they get passed around and productivity drops rapidly. Sure, there are people who abuse sick time, but there are patterns that emerge. This is a case where they could learn from Dr. Demming. Take action to investigate a level of frequencies that are significant outliers. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons, and in that event I suspect a bit of compassion will pay dividends. In the case of what turns out to be abuse of the policy, one can take corrective action.
Our company imposed a policy saying that you had to phone and speak to your supervisor in the morning if you were going to be out sick. I have taken very few sick days over the years. I pointed my supervisor to my lack of absences. Then I told him that when I **am** sick, that I usually need sleep to recover and that having to get up to call him would impede my recovery. I told him that when I knew I wan't going to make it in that I would immediately email him and periodically notify him of the progress of my recovery. He was fine with that.
Generally, if you treat people like adults, they will respond well. Just deal with the corner cases...
It's massive stupidity though. For one, I find many conditions will clear on their own in a day or two. I don't need a doctor to tell me that. So, I can be sick for 24 hours in the comfort of home or I can go wait for hours on end at urgent care and share whatever I have with the waiting room while they give me what they have and cough a co-pay (along with that lung) just because some asshole stuffed into a suit wants to treat everyone like children.
Even in school, a parent's note is good enough.
On a side note, I recall an article some time ago where a doctor wrote the requisite excuse note and included a nastygram about wasting limited medical resources by requiring a doctor's note for every brief absence.
Peasants desperate for a job are lined around the corner, we actually need to make the job oppressive enough that we can use, dispose, and rotate them. That's not sarcasm, that's the literally the optimized, max-margin reaction for a glut.
And it gets worse each time we trade thousands for a couple dozen "floor models" and one robotechnician.
Letting sick people heal stifles innovation.
No you don't. He said Europe but meant a specific country which I can tell you is at least not Germany because in Germany you usually only require a doctor's note if you're sick more than three days in a row. In the IT sector at least, which is where I worked when in Germany. And yes obviously people could start abusing it but that's easily visible and HR can take action then. Frees everybody else from bullshitting and getting each other sick. Sick days are also unlimited.
I got gastro in week two of my employment in Germany and I went to the doctor first thing in the morning (not walk in clinic or hospital just the doctor I had selected to be my GP because he was 5 min from my apartment) and got a note for 5 days. Was sick for a day or two here and there without a note required later that year and got a 10% raise that year.
Not every country is as crazy as the US.
Did I mention Walmart tried to get a hold in Germany? The bailed out. Their US labour tactics didn't fly and they can't operate unless they severely exploit their workers.
If you have FMLA, there is more protection. Some of these examples sound like sickly people or people with kids that inevitably get sick and need care. Neither are not necessarily FMLA cases. Anyone stop to consider some of those workers who frequently call in and are habitually tardy, the points are adding up, and when they call in it pushes them over the threshold? Shit my wife's employer dings more employees for "patterns of behavior" (subjective, because they feel like fucking with you) than objective occurrences.
Hey, it's probably a right to fire... oh, wait, haha, silly me: right to HIRE state. I get the two words confused, because whenever I hear about "right to hire" it has to do with canning some poor fuck.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I know of several Walmart employees that have been made to work overtime during the holidays without pay. I can't get them to agree to say anything because they need their job. I doubt it's corporate policy but I know things like this happen all the time there.
They threw up on the products before bagging them.
To pay their way to being a professional nerd or at times when there are few technical jobs around a lot of nerds work in retail.
It's actually a bit of a worry that I had to tell you that. Are you really paying so little attention to what is going on around you?
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/06/02/185219/walmart-is-turning-its-employees-into-delivery-drivers-to-compete-with-amazon
I commented on the one linked here about how unlikely it would be that Walmart's attempt to force employees to use their own vehicles to deliver its merchandise would in fact be "voluntary".
This is exactly how it will be.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You could go to the doctor's offices or phone the doctor and kindly ask an home visit, if you feel too weak or have an high fever. I've asked very few sick days, but when I asked them was only because the doctor ordered me to stay at bed or when I was rushed to A&E.
The real problem is employers who treat their employees like children. "Bring a note from the doctor." Kind of like when you were a kid and if you missed school you had to "bring a note from your parents."
Mine thought it was stupid, and gave me a blanket note at the beginning of the year saying that if I was absent it was with their permission. Trust. Instill it, then build on it.
Look at the potential for personal information leakage from a doctor's note. They just look up the doctor, and if it's a specialist, they can draw some prejudicial conclusions.
Cancer specialist? Oops - they're going to be a big insurance liability - better fire them.
Psychiatrist? Oops, they might be a nut case - better fire them.
Doctor specializing in sex changes? If they were female at birth, they're going to want a pay raise after the operation - better fire them.
And if they were born male? We don't need bathroom wars disrupting business - better fire them.
They're not paying you for the time off, so what makes them think they're entitled to pry into what is by definition private time, not time that you're employed? Just sign the thing "Arnold Horshak's mother" and when they ask WTF, say "Did I ever tell you about my uncle Max?" :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Then phased out the extra days, so you effectively have no sick days. The places that still have actual sick days have done studies, and found that employees perform better.
Learn to love Alaska
This would be the reason I get the flu every time I visit a Walmart.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
This has been the case for more than a decade, but 4 years ago the SDP decided one more way to "destroy the morale of veteran teachers and drive a wedge between the union (PFT) and workers was to force everyone who get 3 instances of absence into disciplinary meetings. As per the bureaucracy of the SDP, if you make it to a second disciplinary meeting, your chances of prevailing plummet -- "clearly you must be a horrible employee if you are here a second time!" is the assumption in the central office; especially for the same infraction. Principals thought the new rule harsh and unreasonable -- it applied a solution needed only for a small minority of teachers who are chronically absent, to everyone, so they enforced it with discretion. The SDP responded the next school year by mandating that it be applied to EVERYONE, and data would be checked, those principals who were found derelict would be disciplined themselves.
Three years on, teachers who are new and don't "get" the process routinely get fired, suspended or quit after a year or two because they run afoul of the policy. Those who are chronically absent on purpose have learned to "game" the system, and still call out regularly with no repercussions, and many sick teachers come to work and get sicker, or worse. There have been off the record discussions of how a flu-like bug, or "stomach flu" will spread through a school in a week or so, where in the past one or two would be out and that's all.
The SDP officially refuses to budge on the policy because "children can't learn if the teacher is not there", but after years of allowing the substitute system to fail and be abused -- daily fill-rate of approx 20%, and most fair to poor performing schools NEVER receiving a sub, privatized it, touting the fill rate would be 80+% from day ONE of the new school year. The contractor never achieved higher than 11%, and their replacement company hovers around 16% currently. The District clearly attempted to address academic performance by ensuring the teachers were teaching, but put little thought into the causes of teacher absence, and more troubling chronic absence (low morale, failing health, assault on employees -- even teachers who were attacked bet penalized for calling out!), and clearly didn't work to implement processes and structures to mitigate teacher absence. In the last year, they implemented auto emails from the Superintendent recognizing employees who have not called out for a year, but little else beyond.
So penalizing employees for not showing up to work is not a new thing, and in fact some employers like this school district have no shame when it comes to its punishments.
Even the Sun goes down.
The key word and tricky phrase is "employee at will".
You can be laid off for any reason whatsoever and it is commonly "reduction in work force".
Not it is a "lay off" which can be done at any time for any reason or no reason at all.
"Firing" is "termination for cause" and you have to have a legitimate reason.
For the individual suddenly without a job; the difference is significant. If you are "fired" you don't qualify for Unemployment Compensation or government supported unemployment services. If you are "laid off" you get to draw unemployment.
NRRPT/RCT
No birth control is 100%. What shitty ass sex education did you receive? And if you say abstinence, you can go fuck yourself.
Growing up, in school, I know teachers got x amount of sick days per year. Sure, they'd take them, but I recall an awful amount of times when they work sick and other times sick on a Friday without symptoms the day before. They could also bank them for years and retire earlier. My sister in law works at a hospital and gets so many sick days a year. She takes them like vacation days so she has to work when actually sick. It's fucking annoying. I do not support rolling over unused sick days. It would be better to have an exception program for the odd extended problem like broken bones, surgery, chicken pox, etc.
To be honest, I just assumed most american companies would fire you if they noticed you being off sick. Seems to fit with the culture. So I guess this is good news! ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Good. Too many of the coworkers I've had over the years abused them. Sunny days in Seattle result in a lot of "sick" days. It sucks being the only responsible ones.
To be fair to them, they probably just wanted to be away from you for a day.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Looks like you need to ask yourself a question. That question is "why am I here?". Perhaps followed by "why don't I fuck off to Soylent news or similar instead of whinging here?".
Good luck in your quest.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Your arguments are worth nothing if you won't put your name to them.
LOL holy shit. "Holophrastic" says put your name to your arguments. Thank you. I think that's a new bar for lack of self-awareness.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
If sick days (and all other paid time off) didn't exist then hourly pay could be higher.
Stop taking sick days everyone, and Walmart will up your pay.
LOL.
The cow who told you that, had it recently jumped over the moon?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Wow, I like that you think you can authenticate my name. "Holophrastic" has been my name for over 25 years. I paid for it. I continue to pay for it. I pay taxes with it. People call me by it. It's on my credit cards. It's on my health card. It appears on my caller-id. And, unlike "John Smith", you won't take more than a few minutes to find me by it, be it through a web search or in a phone book.
But really, I never said your arguments need your real name. Simply a name to group them with your other arguments. One lonely anonymous post isn't a conversation. Ten anonymous posts can be ten humans or one human. The conversation is very different.