Am I too European / social health care to understand? /s
In all seriousness, as a European it’s unimaginable to force myself to work for a week, just to get everyone else sick and cause way more loss than if I had just stayed home…
Unless you’re self employed, then you might be fucked.
This! My HR guy (he isn’t exactly a manager or boss) even encourages sick days for mental health or if you’re just feeling a bit iffy. The gain in productivity and happiness is actually worth it for the company. Plus part of the pay for sick days is actually covered by health insurance afaik, so financially it’s not really a problem for the employer.
At least here in germany, the employer is fully reimbursed for the pay of sick days. Although, if you are sick for more than 6 weeks, your employer stops paying altogether and the insurance directly pays you about 70-90% of your regular pay.
Wasn’t till recently that I got a job with sick days. I’m in Canada too, so you’d think we’d have it better but we don’t. Many jobs, they won’t fire you for staying home when you’re sick, but they won’t pay you either, and to most people, losing even a day’s pay is unaffordable.
Well they aren’t punishing you, you see. The system is set up to put the power into the hands of the employee. They can make the independent choice of whether to not get paid or to work while sick & risk forcing others into this same choice!
They assume the lost revenue due to people pretending to be sick is less than the lost revenue due to people actually being sick and trying to work.
Also, management tends to be older people who think working more hours is more betterer. My boss works from 7a-6p with no lunch, 5 days a week. Sometimes he comes in early on top of that.
He’s salaried. He isn’t making any extra and usually doesn’t have anything to do for several hours in the middle of the day. There is literally no reason for it.
I’m told he went through a divorce at the beginning of the pandemic though. We briefly discussed making nonessential workers unable to go to work here by law, his idea was to love in the office 3 days a week.
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