I used to work in a nursing home where we had a presenteeism problem. It was management’s idea. Even though we were supposed to get sick days, you needed a Doctor’s note, you got written up for any sick days on a Monday or Friday. Using more then one sick day a quarter would get you written up. Leaving sick required the management to interrogate you for real evidence of illness. So the the staff was always coming in with all kinds of nasty contagious germs to care for the frail elderly, and seriously ill.
I have been guilty of this with multiple illnesses last month. I just started a new job and have no paid time off.
I almost never get sick but since November 15 I have had Kidney Stones ( missed half a day and they took pity and paid me ) then it was Pink Eye (!!! WTF Pink Eye? I still dont know where I got that?!) and lastly a sinus infection that got so bad (because I also have zero health insurance) that it made my teeth ache too badly to eat. I tried to be very careful and use Lysol and wash hands with each.
All of the bosses even commented about the Pink Eye but declined to send me home…same thing when I lost my voice and shook with fever at the onset of the Sinus Infection.
Now almost everyone in the office is sick and I feel awful because I know it is my fault. Well actually I finally DONT feel awful for the first time in over a month! 
Drae’s broken tailbone reminded me of a problem I had with a recent boss…
We were in Costa Rica, a team of 8. Myself and two other guys had been there for a term already; the rest, including the boss, were new.
If one of us was throwing up and it was alcohol-related, the boss would be all “oh, man, that sucks, stay home”. But if it was some bug then he claimed you were faking it (faking it? Have you looked at my face? Are you color blind? Instead of light brown, today I’m military green!); dizziness? Faking it. Fever? Faking it. Doctor certificate saying it looks like it’s the flu and not dengue but anyway you should take a calcium supplement and get retested in a week? Faking it. Tremors in a leg? Faking it. Your legs give up and you fall down? Faking it.
So basically if you had something he ever got, it was real… and if not, you were faking it. If he ever gets married, I hope his wife is a bitch to match, because in my book giving birth and then being told you’re faking it is grounds for divorce with a small rusty spoon.
I was fired once for calling in sick, when my boss saw me at a convenience store that day. Thing is, I had conjunctivitis (pinkeye), and it was a waitressing job. My boss simply could not understand that while I wasn’t feeling especially unwell, I was wildly contagious, terribly unsightly, and felt that I shouldn’t be serving food.
One of my previous jobs had this problem - it was like it was a badge of honor to come in sick.
I hate it. If you are sick, stay home.
Dammit, I was going to say I was a postal worker. You ruined it.
Unfortunately my job has this problem as well. You can earn time off for sick days or vacation or whatever but you are very limited in how you can use them. Taking a vacation next month and giving plenty of notice? Fine, take all the time you need. So sick you are too dizzy to drive? You’d better find a way to come into the office. I have missed 3 days in 9 months, one for food poisioning that caused severe vomiting and made me sleep on the bathroom floor, one for being so sick with some kind of cold/flu virus I lost my voice (not the best thing for when you are in a call center), and one due to a vicious insomnia attack. I hadn’t slept more than 2 hours in 3 days and when I was finally able to sleep it happened to be about an hour before I was supposed to go into work. I called in sick so I could catch up on all the sleep I’d missed and spent the next 16 hours in bed asleep. I guess I probably could have gone to work with the insomnia thing but I was at a point where I was going to start hallucinating and decided that wouldn’t be the most fun thing to experience at work AND I would have to drive there and back which wouldn’t have been safe. Thanks to those 3 days I am on a verbal warning and if I miss 2 more days before this coming august I will be fired. I can plan all the vacations I want though, as long as they have plenty of notice they don’t care.
Calling in sick where I work has a serious snowball effect. ONE PERSON calling in sick can drastically change the schedule of 7-8 people and can seriously effect business. If you’re not dying or throwing up, you’re coming into work.
One poor guy ended up working over 24 consecutive hours. He was scheduled from 11AM-6PM, then started his other job at 4AM the next day. So the other guy calls in sick at 5. Only two other guys do his job (a job that’s required), one was out of town, the other one had been out partying.
Result…one person calling in caused this poor kid to work from 11AM until 2AM, turn around and work his OTHER job from 2AM to Noon. Nary an hour of sleep. :eek:
I’d call it poor management. People get sick, take vacations, attend mandatory training, get run over by the proverbial bus, etc. Staffing levels need to take this into account.
True. Problem is, you hire 2-3 more people and then everyone gets their hours cut to make room. Less hours = less money.
But that’s bad management again.
I’ve worked in many places where the weekend shifts were the “cover people”. If you were in the weekend shift, you worked something like 75% of your yearly hours on weekends and vacation periods; the rest were hours were you could be called to cover for someone else.
In a factory with 3x8 shifts in the week and 2x12 on the weekend, that means any floor or lab worker getting sick in the week had at least two trained people who could cover for them.
Office work that may have to be done absolutelyurgentlyandwecannotwaituntiltomorrow should always have at least two people able to do it, as well. I don’t know how this works in other countries, but in Spain only people “with powers” can sign certain company documents, like cheques. The first thing my brother does when he gets to a new job is find out how many people have “powers” and figure out the probability that they’ll be unavailable at the same time. It’s not a matter of giving powers to the cleaning lady, but if the owner travels a lot and the manager is the only other person who can sign your payroll payment order, maybe you should considering giving power to the financial manager. These powers can be restricted: you can give the HR manager power to sign the payroll payment order but not any other kind, for example.
You’re making all kinds of sense, Nava, but unfortunately a lot of companies really aren’t all that interested in running a business properly. I’m not entirely sure what their criteria is for management decisions - no, wait, I do know - does it appear to make us more money in the short term? Sure, running a business properly will make more money and make you more stable in the long term, but businesses don’t care. They’ll “run lean” and make no realistic provisions for sick employees for years, and keep replacing burned-out staff, rather than create a long-term plan that allows job stability and retains valuable, trained employees. We (in Calgary, at least) live in a corporate world of disposable employees. This might be changing with the dramatic employee shortages that we are experiencing, but business is slow to change.
I work in a petri dish. I’m a poker dealer and am constantly handling cards/chips of players. Every 30 min. we get a new batch of germs to pass around the table.
Regardless of how much PTO (personal time off) we have, if we call in sick, we get a write-up. 3 write ups in 90 days and you can be fired. If you must leave your shift, you are required to get a doctors note. If you have no PTO time, you can not take time off.
You should see how fast the germs spread. It is worse than a day care center. We have had people come to work with chicken pox, pink eye, various and sundry flus, active shingles, you name it.
But hey, they are bringing someone in to evaulate our methods to see if it causes Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
Terrorists: If you want to wipe out the country, start in a poker room. Bad air circulation, close bodies, old people with weak immune systems.
FWIW, I missed one day my entire pregnancy. I actually worked the day I delivered my daughter, had I dropped below my required hours, I would have lost my benefits.
I almost never call in sick unless I physically can’t sit up straight or talk. I called in sick on Tuesday because I’ve been fighting off some sort of vicious viral thing for a week that finally took control. I felt horrible. Because I’m the only one doing my job and it HAS to be done (reception at an emergency vet). So they had to call around and find someone to take my place and come in on THEIR day off. Even more incentive not to call in sick.
But I agree with everyone else that employers do NOT make it easy to call in sick. I’ve never had a job where you get any sort of sick time before 3 months of employment. And even then, it’s usually not much. And vacation? 6 months is the shortest time I’ve been able to start using it. And when you’re working paycheck to paycheck… I’m going to be lucky to make ends meet this time around since I’m going to be missing 2 days on this check (got Christmas off but don’t get holiday pay or anything).
Call centers are especially horrible. The job I had before this was a tech support call center and they were NAZIS about not coming into work. Basically if you were late 4 times or called in sick 4 times in a year. Fired. That’s it. If you managed to get a doctor’s note, sometimes they’d stretch it out for you a bit but when I left they were even phasing that out some. So yeah, you were scared to death to even call in sick since you got the third degree about it and got written up the 2nd day you called in sick during the year.
I work for a very small company, too – four full-time and one part-time person in our office and studios here, and another eight people in the “home” office 50 miles away. But our employer is adamant that people not work when they are sick, especially when they are or could be contagious. We’re encouraged to take our sick time, even if it’s to use the time as “mental health” time. We regularly use sick time for routine medical stuff (our health plan encourages preventive care). One plus for us is that we all are cross-trained, and if necessary the head shed can send down one or two people to help in the event of illness.
One thing I love about my company is that they implemented 9/80 work periods every two weeks. The way it works is, you work 44 hours one week, and 36 hours the following week. 9 hours per day, in other words, which gives you every other Friday off. Which you can use for routine doctor visits, car repairs, etc. and still not use up your sick time or vacation time. It helps tremendously. And if you have to work your Friday off, it pays time-and-a-half.
I’m very lucky. But we still have germ-spreaders coming into work. 