I used to work in a nursing home that had a point system similar to where Chimera works. One person came in with a “stomach bug” and flattened nearly the whole rehab department. If they had followed the policy to the letter they would have had to fire every PT,OT, COTA and PTA they had. I guess the lesson is, if company policy means working sick, make sure you bring enough norovirus for everyone.
I get 4 sick days a year, which isn’t a hell of a lot if you actually get sick (though we also have short-term disabillity leave and such). Last year during the H1N1 insanity, the management issued a flu policy that anyone with flu symptoms was not to come to work, period, until they had been medically cleared. I don’t know how they handled payment for leave time for people who ran out of sick days.
My last full time job was the only one where I got sick days. Man it was so nice to have a cold and be able to stay at home and rest.
I always went in, as I didn’t get paid. People would say “You should stay home,” and I’d answer, “You want to chip in and pay for the money I lost”? That always shut them up.
I recall in 1996 I got sick with the flu and man I was so sick. I was out 8 days, and I was hurting so bad for money. Becuase losing eight days was hard back then.
I feel pretty lucky. After 8 years with my employer, I have 25 days of paid time off. While 10 of those are technically for “personal time” and are supposed to be for sick, unplanned, time off, they’re very flexible with personal or vacation time. I think I took 5 planned days off this year. It’s been a whopper of sick time for me this year, first the flu twice in January, then a couple of v/d stomach viruses, then a crazy throat infection in August that landed me in the ER and off work for 6 days. And I think I’m getting allergy stuff I never had before and have had some doozy sinus headaches. I have one day left worth of paid time off, and the rest were all unplanned sick time. I hope next year is better. The year after that, I get another 5 days added in! The pay is low here, but the health insurance and time off policies are nice, I think it’s their way to make up for the crappy wages. Plus, my boss is awesome about stuff like this, and since I can do some stuff from home if really needed and they can call, email or text me if something’s urgent, I’m not stuck in the same boat as some others who do different work here.
Paid sick leave is a luxury. Heck, excused sick leave is a luxury.
Case in point - when I was a waiter, I had the flu. Bad bad flu. Doc says take these horse pills and stay home for a few days. Work says, find someone to cover your shifts, or bye bye job. So I go to work so I can get the phone numbers of the other waiters, and spend 2 hours trying to get someone to cover for me. Two hours being Typhoid Mary in the tiny office of a busy restaurant. No luck. Finally my boss let me go home, as he was the one getting the most exposure to my coughy, snotty self.
Only that one shift, though. I had to work through the rest of my flu, then the month of bronchitis that followed.
So during cold and flu season, expect to be exposed to all kinds of nasty any time you enter a restaurant, retail establishment, grocery store…in short, any place that tends to pay minimum wage.
Yep. In my early 20s I was still a sickly person, and served at a crappy diner full-time. I couldn’t afford to take off, and wasn’t allowed to do it much if I wanted to keep my shifts and my job. I used to spread disease amongst the employees, so I’m sure I got a ton of customers sick.
I remember the summer I turned seventeen, and I had this really hideous sinus infection (it lasted all summer, because my mother* thought I was exaggerating and refused to take me to the doctor), and I was hacking and coughing all over the place. My parents would NOT let me call off of work. (Keep in mind, I was a minor, so I didn’t really have a choice)
I got sent home from work at LEAST twice, since I was hacking all over the place – and both times my dad chewed me out. 
*What is the word for the opposite of a hypochondriac? My mother would have to be bleeding from the eyeballs before she’d visit a doctor.)
Short Term Disability insurance. Point wise, that would fall under the “doctor’s note” thing and being covered.
Or course, there are those employees who elect not to take the insurance. They’re fucked if anything happens. Of course, most of them are young and “immortal”.
It helps to have a hypochondriac as a boss. Every September a memo goes out from his office stating that under no uncertain terms are you to come to work “sick”. Understand this is not a food or health related industry.
So much as a sneeze, a wayward cough or the appearance of off color will get you sent home.
Of course this is only a good thing if you have the acquired sick leave (6 days a year) to use.
My supervisor and our department manager will ask you to leave if you are obviously sick. I really appreciate that about them. We get tons of paid time off though, so no one in our office should have their finances affected.
So if I had a seizure in the morning, I’d have to call my doctor to have him call the work place? Nuts to that.
Very much the same for my Wife and I. I currently have 726 hours of sick time accrued. My Wife probably has over a thousand. I will take a sort of emotional health day perhaps once or twice a year. More likely, didn’t sleep well and generally don’t feel too good on those occasions.
One time, my Wife woke up feeling a bit off. I felt ehh, not so hot but certainly could have gone into work. I decided to stay home. Turned out to be the on set of the worst flu that my Wife and I have ever had. Sick as a dog about 6 hours later. Damn good thing that I stayed home. I think I was out for 8 days. It’s sort of a blur.
We take sick leave for Dr’s. and Dentist appointments and such. I even used to take sick time to take my dog to the vet (hey, people take sick time for their kids) but that’s really a bit over the top, and I stopped doing that a long time ago.
About once a year I seem to get a nasty lingering cold that requires me to stay out for a few days in a row. My boss does have his faults, but when he knows someone is not feeling well, he will tell you to go home if you want. Really, I don’t think people get much done when they are sick. And it makes no sense to get other folks sick.
I will keep an eye on things at least through email and such (unless I’m sick as a dog and don’t really care If the world was about to blow), and I would really like to get set up with a remote connection (I’m on a satellite dish though, and the latency really, really sucks). But I could do a bit better making sure thinks are up and running smooth. Or just be able to work an hour or two when I have an idea about something that I want to test. But that is sort of frowned on as we don’t have any type of telecommuting policy. That will probably change.
My previous job though was horrible about this. It was shift work, and we shared workstations. Lots of colds got passed around, but boy did they hate it when you called in sick. It really hurt morale. And probably production too.
I don’t consider colds a problem, and I go to work with a cold, after dosing myself appropriately so that it doesn’t bother me.
However, I have a friend who has asthma and severely compromised lungs. If she gets a cold, she could (and has) ended up in the hospital. She is quite vociferous about people who come to work when they have “just a cold.”
My criteria is pretty much if I have a fever. However, I feel so crappy every single morning that it happens, when I’m really, genuinely sick, that I don’t even realize it until I’m at work, and at the point where I should start feeling okay–I don’t. At that point, I usually prefer to stay at work, particularly if I’m feeling too vile to drive home. Fortunately, this is rare. And only once did I ever feel crappy enough that I couldn’t drive home or take public transportation (and that happened fairly early in the day–I made my husband take time off his job to come get me and take me home, which is way more demanding than I normally am. He figured I must be at death’s door.)
I would be in really deep shit if I couldn’t sneeze at work, since barely a day goes by when I don’t sneeze a couple of times!
I used to run negative in sick time due to kidney disease, chronic sinus problems, migraines, and taking sick leave when TheKid was sick. Luckily, we can dig into vacation hours if we zero out sick time. Unfortunately, my (then) new supervisor decided I was abusing sick leave and attempted to force me into filling out FMLA paperwork. I refused.
It was pointed out that I only seemed to use sick leave on days I was scheduled to be in office. Well, if I had a migraine I could alter my home work environment and manage. If I was miserable from a sinus infection (I’m at the point where a sinus infection almost immediately spreads to my ears, saliva glands, and throat - my whole head wants to explode) I could use my breaks and lunch to take a long hot shower to clear my head, at least temporarily. None of this was possible when I worked in office.
Our standard policy was that if we are out three consecutive days, we were required to have a note from the doctor. During this time I was required it for any sick day, otherwise I would face disciplinary action.
Now we ROWE and in the past six months I’ve been out only once (double kidney infection - whee!).
Many years ago I lost a job due to TheKid having Fifth’s Disease. I was out for a week. When I came back, with medical note, I was told I was no longer fit for the job I had been doing - despite receiving a higher than normal raise shortly before, explicitly due to my quality of work. They offered me a job back in the shop, with a lovely $4/hour pay cut - meaning I would no longer be able to afford my apartment. I declined, so was let go.
That’s crazy! Someone like me with allergies and asthma would be home more than I was at work.
I know that in the past if someone can show its not a contagion and is chronic they don’t press the issue, I believe mostly because of the ADA.
I teach, and I don’t worry too much about bringing my germs to school–the place is such a petri dish that I really don’t think I’m adding much to the overall load. It’s very, very difficult for me to be out, especially unexpectedly. This is especially true for my AP Economics class. We have to go SO FAST to cover everything by the exam, and unlike my AP English class, AP Econ is pretty much straight lecture. Furthermore, 90% of kids feel entitled to a day off if the teacher isn’t there, so even if you can come up with a useful assignment, it’s wasted if they don’t extend the effort. And you can’t circumvent that by making it a major, major grade because some kids legitimately won’t understand it and will have no teacher to help them.
Missing the occasional day is not too big of a deal, and if I am really, really miserable, I’ll stay home, but I’ve never missed more than two consecutive days, and I think a week out would have a definite impact on my AP score the end of the year. I’d take the time if I had to, but I’d hate it.
I am even luckier, it seems. As a State employee in Denmark, I not only get full pay when off sick, I can also take two days if one of my children falls ill or is injured. My wife in private employment only gets full pay for her illness or the first day of a child’s illness. I think that sick pay may vary depending on the agreement between your union or employment group and your employer, but as far as I know, even the first sick day is paid (even if not at full loan).
I’m sure some people milk this system. I think I have had more days off for sick children than for myself.
There had to be an upside to the high tax rate:p
Our system is engineered such that people will come in sick.
Instead of having separate sick days and vacation days, along with some way to account for jury duty, etc… the oh-so-wise powers that be have rolled it all into “Personal Time Off” days.
We get something like 3 weeks worth per year of these, and they accrue like vacation time, with the exception that you can run a deficit up to a point.
The problem here is that people have to make the choice of giving up future vacation days vs staying home from work.
Needless to say, unless people are deathly ill, they show up.
I tried explaining this to the head of our department, who was horrified that people would make such a “selfish” choice. She didn’t get what I was saying, I think.
If they separated them, you would have people taking sick days when not sick, but you’d have people more willing to take them when they are sick too.
On top of that, when it’s icy and snowy and people really ought not drive in Dallas, many of them still brave the roads lest they take a PTO day when they don’t have to.
Well, 20 years ago I worked for a company where we got 21 days per year Time Bank PTO. Combined Vacation and Sick time to use as you saw fit. I liked that a lot. You weren’t sick, you had over 4 weeks for vacations and the occasional day off. You were sick a lot, well, you still had 21 days to cover it, you just weren’t going to get a lot of vacation.
Me personally, I tended to take about 1 day per month for “mental health” and call in sick when I wasn’t really sick. This still left me with 9 days per year for the occasional real illness and a week long vacation. At one point (we tended to completely reorganize the department and get new or at least different bosses every 6 months) one of my managers called me in, really upset that I was calling in sick once a month. I pointed out that the last time I had taken more than a week of vacation at once, it seemed to produce a lot of tension and trauma for my department (I had no backup person for my job function) and that I carefully chose the days when I called in so that they were days when I had no meetings (or nothing more than a team meeting) and was caught up on my work. After that, she was totally cool with me continuing the pattern. Especially when I pointed out that I had close to 200 hours accumulated and could easily take an entire month off if she preferred that I take it all at once.
I need a job like that again.