I know individual organizations are going to take some hard looks at WFH and I could easily see it augmenting or mostly replacing sick days some places.
Agreed that a doctor’s note requirement for a sick day is total bull. Waste of everyone’s time and resources, encouraging people to work sick.
Talk about Capitalism Gone Wild! (post #26).
Now you’re proposing that employers require you to keep working even when, say, you a typical flu–( a high fever and are so weak that you spend all day in bed sleeping.
That will be great for employee morale. 
Not proposing it but you know capitalism. It wants what it wants. 
I don’t think a WFH option can ever be legislated, though. Some jobs just CAN’T be done remotely, like construction work.
I do hope that COVID broke the culture of expecting employees to work while sick. I had a horrible time with this during my work career, and it was exacerbated by bosses and high level employees with incredibly unhappy home lives…they’d come in even if they were deathly ill and suffer on the couch in their office, simply because they couldn’t entertain the prospect of staying home with their spouses. And they expected their employees to do the same.
I used to get major pushback for calling in sick, sometimes I’d be flat out told to get over it and come in anyway.
Although usually it was more of…we’re really busy today…do you have a fever? Are you throwing up? How often? Really? It sounds like if you throw up before you leave your house you could make it into work before you have to throw up again…at which point I’d reiterate that I wasn’t coming in, and then (this was in the days before cell phones) answer trivial phone calls from my coworkers every half hour or so, not because they needed to speak to me, but because they were hoping I wouldn’t answer so they could “bust” me for faking it.
Once, many years ago when the very small business I worked for was busy and short-staffed, I had been working through the flu for several days and just couldn’t do it anymore. So I went to the ER and they took one look at me and my 104 fever and admitted me. I was there for several days, hooked up to an IV.
While I really needed to be hospitalized, the primary reason I went to the hospital was that it provided the only acceptable excuse, other than death, for missing work.
And the doctor’s note thing —- one time a young woman at work actually brought one in, because she got so much hassle for calling in sick. The reaction of the office manager was…
“I know where this doctor is located and I know where Joanna lives. If she was well enough to get out of bed, get dressed and survive the 45 minute drive to the doctor and back, she damn well could’ve come to work.”
This work while sick culture really needs reforming.
Well, that’s the situation now. If I am mildly sick–the first couple days of a cold–I go in. So do my students, because they can’t get credit for a class if they miss more than 10% of the days, and it adds up quickly. Allowing both of us to WFH and not be penalized would make a big difference.
I am not talking about legislating work from home–more a culture shift, and a recognition that a lot more jobs can be done remotely now that we’ve all made this adjustment/learned this tech.
Well, personally it’s not really a culture shift I totally embrace though WFH certainly has its place. I am actually a little shocked that I have to defend real sick days for all employees as more important than WFH.
That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
So am I.
More flexible WFH and sick days may be two separate things. I suppose that any place that doesn’t have sick days is also not going to have WFH options anyway, so enhancing WFH for office workers isn’t going to help hourly retail employees who don’t even have the option of sick days.
But even with sick days, one issue is that the initial part of a sickness doesn’t really justify a sick day. At first someone may just feel a little off and is still capable of working. The person may not know if they are contagious since they don’t know if they have the flu, a cold, or just allergies. If someone goes to work until they are sick enough to justify a sick day, they have likely already infected many coworkers and customers. Flexible WFH (where possible) would be a way to allow someone to self-isolate while still getting their work done.
Not only does it make total sense, but it is something I expected to happen. It really shows how we can really fight disease on an individual level. Just on a personal level our family has been cold/flu free this past year which is unusual with a school ager and my usual work with kids on hod due to COVID. I am hoping this brings greater awareness of how we can make a positive difference.
If you think that’s what you’re defending then no wonder we’re talking past each other.
Paid sick days for all (and paid days for caring for sick kids and spouses) is a given. We’re never going to make a dent in unnecessary public illness until we have that. WFH is an adjunct to paid sick that will help even more by addressing the “just getting sick; still functional but now highly contagious” stage that @filmore explains just above…
It’s not either / or. Its “one” or “one and two.”
Nope. The original comment that started this was
which specially rates their importance in comparison to each other and says they are equal. And FigNorton disagreed they were equally important, rating paid sick days as more important. I agree with that assessment.
Exactly.
Well then I’m the bad reader here. My POV was “and”, not “or”. I missed that transition. As Emily Latella used to say “Never miiiind!!!”.
I’m not optimistic that it has. There’s a lot of managers that just “want to see your face” at 6:00 or 7:00, and a lot of brown-nosers that want to be there at 7:00 or 8:00 to prove they’re “company players”. I’m lucky that I’ve got a boss that gets it, even if she’s checking emails at 9pm.
It’s a given that it’s necessary, unfortunately the trend is for corporations to use temps and “consultants” instead of hiring full-time employees, and the temps tend to not get sick time. Heck, most non-exempt (hourly) workers don’t get sick time.
And that trend isn’t just for corporations any more. My son is a fireman. He works part time at two houses because the fire houses in our county figured out that they can hire part timers and not pay benefits. So, pretty much anyone new to the job or to the area has to be working 2 houses or a house and an ambulance service just to make ends meet.
Yes. It’s a given it’s what we need. But almost certainly, as you say, not what we’ll get. Sorry if that wasn’t explicit.
At least we won’t get it without a fight from the 50% who’re either winning from this extortion or are too dumb or misled to see they’re losing from it.
There’ a combination of changes in technology and corporate culture that should happen, and in many cases are happening. Take teachers, for instance: Teachers (in most districts) already could take off paid sick days. But most have really tried to avoid doing so, because pay isn’t the only reason we do this job, and if the teacher stays home, the students will probably just miss out on a day of education, and there’s little you could do about that (you might get a good sub who really does do almost as much as you would have, but you might not).
Now, though, like @MandaJo describes, the teacher can still do most of the actual teaching, even while staying home, because all of the classrooms have the technology to make that possible. You still need a sub physically in the room to supervise the kids, but that sub’s skills (or lack thereof) are much less relevant than they used to be. So now, a teacher CAN actually stay home.
Back to the OP, small changes in numbers can make a big difference, if those numbers are in exponents. One critical number for disease outbreaks is the R number: How many other people, on average, will each sick person infect. If R is greater than 1, by any amount, the disease will spread exponentially (it might be a slow exponential, bu even a slow exponential is still exponential, and can eventually become very fast). If R is less than 1, then the disease might spread a little, but will peter out.
And even if the maskholes and deniers really are half the population, the conscientious half of the population is still significantly decreasing the R value. Probably not by half, since there’s still some spread even among the people who are taking reasonable precautions, but by enough that it’s easy to imagine that we’re decreasing it past that magic threshold. Halving the R doesn’t mean that half as many people get sick; it can be the difference between everyone getting sick, and almost nobody getting sick.
Honestly, I think that if reasonable sick pay and leave were mandated, a lot of employers would suddenly be VERY accommodating in regard to WFH. And anyone who could manage it would choose it over using up an allotted paid sick day.
The most liberal plan of mandated sick leave an pay is not going to give unlimited paid sick days-- it will include some paid sick days, and some provision for extended unpaid leave for catastrophic illnesses, if a person chooses not to apply for disability, or applies and is turned down. So, for anyone for whom WFH is possible, I’m sure it will be offered and used.
When I was a supervisor, we had a problem with people calling in sick through our emergency pager (expensive for us), when we had good reason to believe they weren’t sick-- like, we knew they had put out calls to everyone on the sub list days earlier, because they had concert tickets.
We ended up making a rule that if you called off through the pager, we needed some kind of paperwork-- your bill from the guy who towed your car, a note from a doctor, something. But if you found a sub for yourself, we couldn’t car less why you weren’t there-- wasn’t our business.
And, we offered VERY good health insurance. I had it. It was great.
On a similar note, the schools around here have already stated new policies regarding snow days - instead of everyone staying home to play in the snow, they’ll have virtual classes similar to those during the pandemic. Makes sense to me!
…says the guy many years from having snow days.
I remember how exciting those days were – watching TV or listening to the radio, waiting to see if your school was closed.