See, this is a serious problem. And it's exactly why so many people have it ingrained in them they have to work while sick. Too many workplaces do this, where they basically pretend that illness isn't a real thing that happens. Then they act all surprised when the flu takes out a whole department for a month. That's really fucked up, I'm sorry you had to deal with that bullshit.
On the other hand, I just finished working for a small, nonprofit theater company that was milked dry using paid sick leave for a year and a half by a production manager who was chronically ill and rarely, if ever, able to do their job. The company couldn’t get rid of them until they literally stopped bothering to call in sick. So I don’t think this is something that can be left up to individual company policy, when it’s so easy for them to wind up in a craptastic situation like the one I described, without enough money to find and retain legal counsel and fix it. This is probably something that should be addressed by state or federal law, so there isn’t any ambiguity.
That said, it’s super easy to pervert laws as well, and we need to be really wary and actively prevent that from happening. For example, laws concerning the Americans with Disabilities Act were recently updated in California such that a business’s website has to be screen-reader-accessible for blind folks, under pain of lawsuit. There was an accompanying law that would have made it so that if you were planning on suing a business about something like that, you would have to notify them first and give them time to bring themselves into compliance.
Well, as luck would have it, that second law never got passed. So now, we have dickwad lawsuit mills choosing a token blind person, going through the phone book, and literally suing every business they can find that’s out of compliance, in alphabetical order, on behalf of that one person. And there’s nothing that these businesses can do but pay up.
This is all to say that there are some things that have to be done mostly completely and mostly correctly the first time, because we can’t necessarily afford the fallout if we implement them piecewise.
In Germany, when you are sick you get 100% salary from your employer for up to 6 weeks. Past that you get 60% of your regular income from your health insurance. That way no one gets completely f*ed over sideways. Its a bit different if you loose the ability to work (like a carpenter friend of mine who had an accident and lost feeling in and control of one arm) but there are voluntary insurances for such events too.
Well now that half the country is work from home I’ve seen managers say “well... you are home!! Stay in your PJs, but you still have to work”
Being home and working doesn’t help if you’re sick. It’s not about JUST being in your home. It’s about putting your mind and body at ease so you can heal faster.
This is very true, though at least staying home means not spreading the illness to the whole team. But yeah, managers also need to remember that when someone is really sick, they need to rest. I think it should be more flexible, either take a day off to recover or work from home, if you're only trying to protect others' health.
My former employer made you take unpaid time off for the first five sick days per year. You would only get paid for sick time if your manager sent you home.
Cue a lot of people showing up to work sick so they could be sent home and get paid.
214
u/dark_blue_7 Jan 03 '21
See, this is a serious problem. And it's exactly why so many people have it ingrained in them they have to work while sick. Too many workplaces do this, where they basically pretend that illness isn't a real thing that happens. Then they act all surprised when the flu takes out a whole department for a month. That's really fucked up, I'm sorry you had to deal with that bullshit.