I send my people home if they are sick. If they don’t have sick time available, I just pay them anyway. Yes, I’m a sucker and someone could take advantage of me, but they don’t. And I get to have happier people and fewer germs. Win-win.
We get 15 sick days per year on full pay. 5 of them can be taken for other reasons such as caring for a sick person, or bereavement. They accumulate over time and I have about 110 days available at the moment.
Sometimes I’m so glad I’m British not American. And I work in an office which is sympathetic with regard to people calling in sick. I get paid sick leave as I’ve passed my six month probation.
I really wish people would stay home when they’re ill (providing they don’t live in a crazy culture where you can get fired for being a normal human being who gets sick.) I got a really nasty cold recently – probably from a colleague who should have taken a day off. (She would not have been punished.) I myself kept going into work because I didn’t want to miss meetings. Consequently I probably infected someone else and I felt ill for far longer than I usually do with my annual October/November cold.
Yes, apparently Sweden’s system was changed precisely because people were milking the system. So I am told, anyway.
We have some sort of system for sick children as well, but being childless I haven’t looked into the INS and outs.
So damn grateful for the company that employs me.
It has the best sick leave policy out of anything I’ve read here. We don’t have any sick days. If you are ill you are expected to stay home. If you are ill for 7 or more days apply for short-term disability. Until you hit that 7th day no one is counting or tracking it, don’t have to fill out any paperwork or anything. If your child is sick same deal, only at the 7th day you have to file for FMLA or whatever.
It is a huge multinational big pharma company. The kind everyone thinks is evil.
I always wonder if the people who create these abysmal absenteeism policies and who often come to work sick as dogs were the same people who, as kids, got awards for “perfect attendance” in school. My junior year of high school I shared a lunch table with a senior girl who’d gotten one of those awards every year since kindergarten and was bucking for one for her senior year too. She came to school with a temperature of 101, coughing all over at our lunch table. Two steroid-dependent asthmatics and someone with a tissue paper immunity (yours truly) shared that lunch table with her. We all missed a week of school drowning with lungs full of crud thanks to her, but she got that meaningless piece of paper! :rolleyes:
It would be nice if someone would commission some sort of study about productivity in companies with good leave policies vs. those (in the same sector) with bad policies.
We have had something similar at Current Employer for the past few years. Starting in January, though, it goes back to separate vacation/personal/sick time with a cap on each, depending on your seniority. I guess corporate PTB finally realized that some people would bankroll the entire amount and take a month or two off at a time.
If you had any banked time left after a particular date, you could either take those days off OR be paid for those days (aka a “payout”).
That’s all going away next year. If you don’t use everything by such-and-such a date, it’s gone with the wind. To quote a coworker, “Plan on being out sick at some point so you don’t lose anything.”
My sick policy is almost exactly like Chimeras for permanent employees. For temp employees that haven’t been made permanent and who have no benefits at all (I’ve seen them take up to 2 full years to decide “yeah, we’ll take them”) its 3 missed scheduled days of work (one write up each) & you are walked to the door and terminated. If you come in sick and a manager catches you, a manager will log you out & order you home.
They’ll give you your writeup/firing the day that you return. You know, when you’re feeling better. :mad:
I know, I know, I bitch about my job too much and there are people out there w/o jobs. But it still sux, boss, it still sux…
Gahh, just reading this thread makes me want to quit my job…
My work sick policy is similar to Chimera’s and Blucher’s. We get points. In fact, I got in a fender bender and bumped my head (lightly), but the next day at work I had a monstrous blinding headache. My boss and everyone else agreed that I needed to get it checked out, so it was off to urgent care for a head scan. I got 4 points for the 6 hours and a disciplinary “coaching” (warning). I do get paid for my sick time, but everyone always has tons at the end of the year because nobody could possibly use it.
It is total bullshit. The thing that really chaps me is that the management who enforce these policies are not subject to them.
Hey, wanna make it worse? For the PTO we DO get;
- Not tracked anywhere we can see. I asked and they said they don’t print it on our checks because it would “cost extra”. So you have to ask the Director (who has > 300 people under him) for your current total, and then wait a couple of days, or weeks, to get the number.
- Work Saturdays? You’ll never get it off no matter how far in advance you ask. Declined for “availability”, meaning they don’t fucking schedule enough people on Saturdays to allow for giving any PTO that day.*
- Don’t use it by the end of the year (most likely because you can’t get it off), you lose it. It gets paid out the following year at 75%. Oh, this year it took until our OCTOBER 15TH CHECK to get paid for last year’s unused PTO. :rolleyes:
- If they don’t like you, they clearly fuck with you. I’ve seen a couple of people be turned down for middle of the week dates when they asked months or weeks in advance, yet other people who asked for those same dates on less notice got them.
- Because of this, the sucky schedules you have no choice over, and the high burnout rate of the job, they have seriously ridiculous call-in rates on the weekend. One weekend a month or so ago, 20% of the people called in sick on Saturday and 16% on Sunday. They responded by threatening to make calling in sick on the weekend be TWO points. I dunno, I’d think a more reasonable response would be to STOP REFUSING TO ALLOW PEOPLE TO TAKE PTO ON THE WEEKENDS (well, and maybe treat your people a little better). But hey, I supposed I shouldn’t be trying to tell my management how to do their jobs, eh? :rolleyes:
If I ever think my job sucks, I just have to read a thread like this and I feel better right away. We can get two days of paid sick leave by just calling in, and if we need more we can go to company nurse or doctor (no huge queues and its free for us) to get a note.
Not sure if people abuse the system much since I don’t see my co-workers usually, but I’ve gotten the impression most people only take sick leave when they need to. I’ve only been on sick leave for something like 8 days total since 2004, first 3 for H1N1 in autumn '09 and later 5 for norovirus in January '10. A slight cold just makes me take some caffeine and ibuprofen and I’ll get by.
Funny thing about the norovirus sick leave was when I tried to get my 2 day sick leave extended to 3 days by phone but was ordered to go see the nurse … who prompty extended it to 5 days and commented how I looked like crap. Saved me from working outside in -28 C for two extra days which was nice. We had a really cold January this year, brrrrrrr.
During one of the company informational meeting thingies there was some talk about people who take a lot of sick leave and how they have a system for reintegrating them into the work force or maybe finding less sternous jobs for them and so on. Not sure what happens if there’s a reduction in the required workforce though, I’d imagine they might try to get rid of the most sickly people first even if it isn’t said aloud. Not really worried with my 1.2 days of sick leave per year average, of course.
In my line of work, I’m exposed to all the germs and bacteria that people leave behind when they come to work sick. My job is to clean/sanitize office areas/breakrooms/restrooms daily.
The account where I work, the workers there have 0 sick days. They are expected to be at work every day and stay over if required. The only time they can be at home sick is if the company nurse sends them home with a fever of 102 or more.
I only have a MAXIMUM of 5 sick days per year earned at a rate of 1/2 sick day per month ( if no work is missed during the 30-day period). I can’t call in sick because I can’t afford to miss unless I have accumulated a sick day by then. Yes, many of my co-workers have to report to work unless they can prove they are truly sick with either a doctor’s statement or a death certificate. Many of us can’t afford to see a doctor because of the lousy insurance we have and don’t make much above minimum wage.
Right now, a powerful stomach virus is running rampant thru the plant. I have to clean and sanitize the restrooms nightly using subpar gloves, hoping I don’t catch it. The chemicals I have to use is very poor because my company is trying to save money.
Remember folks, there is a group of people that has to clean up after all of the sick workers. They have a higher exposure level to the diseases and can’t afford the medical care.
This is a bit of a problem problem where I work now. We get a number of sick days dependant on seniority, which is fairly generous. I get 8 a year at this point, and I actually take maybe two or three. However, there are several people who are sick exactly the number of times that they have days off every year. They get sicker as they get more seniority and more days, naturally. It does cause some minor morale issues, but overall it’s certainly better than a bunch of the other systems people are working under.
I have the same thing happen to me. I feel absolutely miserable until about 9:30 or 10 am a minimum of four days a week: I am NOT a morning person. So a lot of the time, if I’m starting to get sick in the morning, I’ll just shrug it off as the way that I usually feel in the morning. I am lucky though in that my boss is really good with giving impromptu half days for pretty much any reason, especially if you can log on and do a little work from home in the afternoon if needed.
I’m fortunate enough to be able to work from home, which I did today as I am full of a headcold and work in an open plan office.
What is it that you guys do where they treat you like such shit? Do you think there’d be a problem with absenteeism without such draconian policies? Is it a skilled position or one of the trades, or is it service industry?
Just curious; nowhere I’ve worked has had such horrible policies. Generally, when I was hourly, it was more a “don’t work, don’t get paid” type situation. There wasn’t any penalty for becoming ill and seeking treatment if it interfered with your work schedule.
bump, these are the jobs that are being offerred now. If you have better one, hang on to it with both hands & fight for it like your life depends on it. When the economy picks up, it will change. When all that money that was yanked out of the market and parked in Gold to offset the stimulus and extend the recession starts investing in the market again, there will be more jobs. Then employees may have better choices.