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Wall Street Journal complains about workers using their sick days
(boingboing.net)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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The whole reason sick days are a thing is that giving employees paid sick time costs you less when they don't come in and make other employees sick. If enough people get sick in a given org, that has a way of really impacting everything about a workplace, it really is cheaper if they stay home until they're not contagious.
The worst part of this situation, to me: that anyone is pressing for sick leave to be tightly audited, or seeking to frame its use as a sort of graft or taking from the employer, or a pretext for preemptively firing employees deemed guilty of being too sick. This kind of talk creates pressure for employees to come to work sick in order to avoid being seen as slackers or thieves, and that in turn (especially in an environment full of flu and covid variants, doubly so on the heels of a fucking pandemic so we should all know better by now) defeats the point of having sick days in the first place.
Sick days are a thing because unions fought for them.
From the article
So pandemic taught people how viruses spread and how not to spread them and coming to work sick is shameful, not a badge of honor. Still, 4 days a year isn't enough.
I worked with a guy, Clint, who had been at the company his whole life, worked his way from the factory floor to head of accounting. The thing Clint chose to brag regularly about was that he was 60-something and had never taken a sick day. Instead, he'd roll in obviously sick, sneeze on everyone, everyone he saw that day would get sick, a few of them followed his stellar example and got more people sick. During those times, no actual work got done except Clint lamenting about how everyone was getting sick. "Must be the weather."
While I appreciate your optimism, you know there's no way this is accurate
I mean, it helped teach me. It's not that I didn't actually understand it before, it's that I hadn't internalized it (and how selfish it is to go around getting other people sick). My dad is one of the "I never take a sick day!" people and when you hear that enough as a kid, the "merit" of that sticks in your bones. It took me several years as an adult to really believe that I wasn't selfish or lazy if I took a sick day.
Did it change your dad? Just out of curiosity.
I am interested, but ultimately it's irrelevant, because our subjective experiences don't really hold a candle to the entire "anti mask" movement, the culture you're describing here, and slightly different but akin to that cultural aspect, the idea of "hustling" to chase fortune.
And that's just the philosophy of it. There's also the millions that most certainly just don't understand shit about germs, mechanisms of how illness spreads, etc.
Nah, unfortunately, he went in the other direction. He's one of the ridiculous anti-mask kine people.
Didn't every adult in the developed world not learn this as a child from their parents? Or failing that, at school? Are most people genuinely that stupid?
It boggles my mind that it took a world changing pandemic for people to learn basic hygiene! If people just washed their hands occasionally (start with after you go to the toilet) perhaps COVID would have never happened.
This only applies to infectious disease
Or a really bad day. Like unbearable pain, or a massive head ache. It's better if people take the time off and recover because they work better and make fewer mistakes. Nothing sucks more then to redo work.
I was talking about the fact that pain is not contagious ... Of course pain is a valid reason to stay at home!
My reasoning was that the risk of spreading the disease can't be the only reason for companies to let you not go to work because it only applies to infectious diseases!
I think the majority of people misunderstood my comment