Yep. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. And when a good chunk of the workforce is part-time, you’d better believe NOTHING would stop most of them from coming in, short of catastrophic illness.
Here’s a scenario: We’ve got a rash of bronchitis-turning-to-pneumonia that’s been going around for the past month or so. Several people in various departments have been hospitalized. Two are still there. Those with the milder strain were sent home the minute they started coughing. Some have recovered. Others haven’t yet.
One of the longstanding part-timers in my department came down with it over the weekend. In all honesty, it’s a wonder how she managed to come in. Deathly pallor, hacking, wooziness, the whole shebang. Naturally our boss, as well as the rest of us, were like, “WTF are you doing here?!? GO HOME!”
“I need the money,” she replied.
“Who gives a [expletive] about the money?” our boss countered. “Your health is more important at this point. GO HOME.”
“I need the money,” she repeated. “I’ve already used up all my sick days for the year. I need the money.”
“GO HOME.”
Honestly, they did the whole back-and-forth thing for a good 10 minutes or so. Finally our boss escorted her to the door. She was still repeating “I need the money” as the door shut behind her.
She ended up in the hospital, btw. I have no idea if she’s still there.
I’m self employed so showing up sick is entirely my own choice. I will try to reschedule any jobs to avoid being at a customers house while ill. That’s usualy ok with them as they don’t want someone with a contagious disease working on there water systems. In emergency situations like a customer being completly out of water, if they want me there(I still inform I’m sick), I’m there regardless of my health.
Working for Home Depot, I took 2 sick days in a five year period. I got about 6 sick days a year. Any unused days were paid yearly. We also got 1-4 weeks vacation time depending on lenght of employment. I would show up. Inform my manager I was sick, do anything that required my attention and bale out as early as possible. I was generaly managing under staffed receiving departments, so one of my employees or I being out did effect us a lot. I told my employees they get 6 days a year, use them however you want but don’t come crying to me when your actualy sick and used them for personaly holidays. Most my employees showed up regardless of health and I sent them home if I could spare them or they wanted out. When they just didn’t show it sucked I worked long days to cover their jobs or on rare occasion drafted someone from another department.
Is this closely related in origin to “bring your child to work when he’s sick so he can hork all in an absent co-worker’s cube and let the hork fester overnight until it’s discovered the next morning by returning absent co-worker?”
I volunteer twice a week at a local hospital and they send you home if you come in with a cold-it’s too damned dangerous to be around patients if you’re spreading germs.
I start my new job tomorrow, so I don’t know what their sick policy is yet.
Our company is switching to the paid Time Off policy at the first of the year. As a new employee I’ll get 19 paid days off (not including 8 company holidays). HOWEVER, if I use more than two days as emergency (not scheduled more than 24-48 hours in advance) time, I’ll get a write up and an “incident”. 2 days out of approximately 250 working days. So for most employees that’s two days a year that your car won’t start, you’re sick, you’re kid is sick, your dog is sick, etc. So yeah, most people come in sick.
They’ve also changed the policy so that if you clock in 1-30 minutes late, you’ll get 1/2 an incident. Either four or five incidents in a rolling calendar year and you’re fired. This is sort of ridiculous. They pay us a reasonable wage ($30K+ per year) and we’re responsible for millions in A/R, and they’re micromanaging our time. Our bosses or no happier than we are.
Update: Went to the doc, who confirmed that it’s a virus on its way out. Gave me a note for work today and said I should be fine for work tomorrow. Hooray!
I’m usually the sick co-worker, because I’m usually on a “don’t work don’t get paid” basis, and I will usually work until I’m damned near dead in those circumstances. I don’t feel too bad for my co-workers; I blame the bosses who won’t pay sick time.
There was a particular company that was funny in that regard. In the factory where I first worked, “safety first” isn’t a slogan, it’s what your brain thinks when it doesn’t have anything more interesting going on. I’ve seen people get packed home (even to the point of a coworker driving them) or, if they lived alone, to their Mum’s. I’ve watched a warehouse operator beeping at a high-ranking visitor who was “beyond the yellow line” without a hardhat and signing to him about the hat; when the visitor ignored him, the warehouse guy stopped his cart (fully), took the keys out of the ignition, grabbed the visitor by the arm and politely but firmly marched him to the entrance for a loaner hardhat. When the visitor mentioned it to the manager, she found it perfectly normal and commendable behavior. It’s in the manuals: you see someone behave in an unsafe manner, you stop them, whether it’s your boss, the manager, the company’s CEO or the bishop of Rome.
Working in the central offices of that same company, a couple times I got tylenol for coworkers, told coworkers to Go Home after they’d been there for more than 12 hours… the first time I did it I was afraid the boss would get angry but instead she came over, backed me up and apologized because she should have done it before I did.
Worst cases: a coworker with lupus. And, although it shames me, I once spent a week at work with a pretty nasty case of gastrenteritis. I knew that spending a week on vacation with Mom had made me sick, but didn’t know it was supposed to be a “stay at home and moan” illness until there was a bit on TV about some Real Madrid footballer being interned for it… I asked “wth is gastrenteritis”, Mom said “oh, the runs at both ends” and I’m like “waaaait a minute… this guy makes 500M€ and he gets sent to the hospital for it and I make barely-decent pay and I’m dumb enough to go to work? Never again!”
In college we were told repeatedly that, “for serious people like you guys” one of the hardest lessons is learning to recognize those times when you’ll be doing the company a favor by staying home.
In my office, EVERYONE comes into work sick. I’ve actually heard people say, on more than one occasion, “I can’t waste my sick days on a cold” because we only get 28 hours of “personal time” a year, and that includes sick days, doctor’s appointments, and any other personal things that may come up (kids needing to be taken to the doctor, etc.)
As such, everyone comes to work sick. And our office has many doors that one needs to grasp to get from one side of the office to the other, not to mention everything else that people touch, sneeze on, etc. all day long. And I notice nobody washes their hands after blowing their nose when they’re sick. It’s just a germ factory, and within days we’re all sick.
It’s stupid. When we all get sick, productivity suffers badly. We get very little done, and what we do get done generally either takes forever or needs to be redone because it’s full of mistakes. But them’s the breaks when you have no sick time.
When you’re on “no work no pay,” sometimes it’s a choice between staying home sick and paying the rent and buying food. My body thanked me for keeping a roof over my head.
I understand the concept of presenteeism, and I am the first person to stay home when I get sick when I have paid sick time, but this seems to be the part of the equation that is always forgotten in discussions of presenteeism - lots of people in lots of circumstances simply can’t afford to not work. It’s not extra money they’re earning - it’s grocery money.
As per contract we get 12 sick days a year. Days that aren’t used are split between comp time or put in the “bank” towards retirement or longterm disability. Some people have retired recently with $80,000 checks for unused sick time. You would think they would encourage you to take your time in sick days. Instead they right you up if they detect a “pattern”. My pattern cosisted of two instances when I took sick time at the beginning of my shift. Four months apart. Now I have to bring in a doctor’s note everytime I take a sick day. I carry a gun and drive a car for 11 hours a day. I’m expected to make decisions that may affect peoples lives. Sometimes I don’t feel 100% and think it would be a good idea to stay home. Now I won’t.
We have really good benefits and ample sick time, and no penalties for using it, but there are still people who come in sick. Sometimes they’ll take off two days if their kids are sick or they have the flu, but after that they come back to work, sick or not. I think maybe they’re in denial that they’re so sick that they need more than two days. They may say something like “I’ll try not to breathe on you” but frankly, where we all work in cubicles that isn’t much help.
Thanks to the wonder of presenteeism, my roommate–who has a naturally incompetent immune system to begin with–had strep (twice), bronchitis, and several different stomach viruses last winter. She used up all her sick days by the middle of February, and was told that doctor’s notes “didn’t count,” despite the fact that she was required to get them. She works in a large call center, which I’ve also found is the worst kind of breeding ground for Share-the-Pain. Her entire department is terrified of being fired for having a cold and staying home.
I also work in a call center, and while the management is very big on “Oh, if you’re sick, then just stay home,” I’ve been written up more than once for my attendance, despite having doctor’s notes that said things like “bronchial pneumonia,” “asthmatic bronchitis,” “strep infection,” and “broken tailbone”.
So basically, it’s “If you’re sick, stay home … for a couple hours, then come in so you don’t lose your job.”
My boss is of the opinion that the only reason you should take a sick day is if you physically can’t make it in. Of course, we’re a primary care clinic, so the idea of staff staying home to keep the germs out is pretty damn silly.
This is probably necessary for our sort of business. I’d say that at any given time, about half of us have a low-level cold, so if we stayed home every time we didn’t feel up to snuff or whenever we had something potentially infectious, we couldn’t stay open.
I’ve taken exactly one sick day in the 18 months I’ve been here, and that was when I had been throwing up all night and couldn’t physically get out of bed.
Yuck. I hope I don’t get similar job conditions as some of you mention at the next job I find! Both of my recent jobs have had similar sick policy - up to 3 days in a row off sick without needing a doctor’s note for a total of a maximum of 10 days per year without a doctor’s note. If you were sick more that that you needed a doctor’s note. However, sick day allowances were completely independent of vacation allowances. There was a limit to how much sick time you could take off even with a doctor’s note; I don’t recall what that limit was - both jobs had long term disability insurance as a job benefit, so eventually I guess that would kick in.
Both jobs had the “fine print” that if they thought you were abusing the 3 days in a row and 10 days in a year limit they could demand a doctor’s note even below those limits, but I never heard of that happening.
I’d like to add another reason why people come in when they’re sick. I’ve worked in any number of places where if you call in sick, it’s automatically assumed by the manager that you’re lying and you’re subjected to an interrogation — the manager will keep asking different questions hoping you’ll slip up and reveal that you’re not really sick, you just want to go to a party.
It gets to the point where it’s easier to just come to work.
That’s exactly why my pneumonia-ridden coworker protested in the scenario I described above. She’s dreading the upcoming hours-being-cut scenario which is typical in our business at this time of year.
Today a woman in another department showed up in a forearm cast. She’d tripped over her dog in the middle of the night and cracked her wrist. She’s on painkillers. She goes to her other PT job as soon as she leaves our employer. Her husband also works 2 jobs. Together, they both earn just enough to cover rent, utilities, and food.
