ajcjobs > BlogBreak > Archives > 2006 > October > 18 > Entry
What good are sick days?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After reading the responses to my last blog entry, “My Office Makes Me Sick”, I was rudely reminded that employers these days just don’t believe in illness or the germ theory.
As respondents indicated, taking sick time can be just as perilous to your professional health as not taking sick time can be to your physical health. Now really, does that make sense? Evidently, the answer is yes among Atlanta employers.
Employers seem to have lost track of the fact that there is a connection between working sick and the spread of disease organisms to other workers.
This just increases decreased productivity - RIGHT? Having one person out ill is sooo preferable to having the whole office decimated by disease. Where have we lost sight of this concept? Productivity? Bottom line? Aren’t these factors impacted when people are working sick?
Employees can be just as bad - people who work sick are becoming the rule instead of the exception.
Some of us have jobs that have to be done regardless and taking a sick day does nothing but make the work pile up higher than it already is.
Right-sizing and workforce reductions mean there’s probably no one else there to do what you do every day. A sick day just complicates things.
When you return you know there will be the need to work extra hours to catch things up and what’s the use of that? With the advent of Paid Time Off, sick days and vacation days have been merged and taking sick days in October screws up the time available for the spring ski vacation.
But hey, thinking of vacation days, if there is no one on your job to take up the slack or complete your work when you aren’t there, WHAT GOOD ARE THEY?
Remember the old days when sick days were fun and the challenge of coming up with a good excuse was a pleasurable experience?
Think of the skill and challenge needed to convincingly act out the illness of choice to make everyone in the office believe you really were really sick.
Do you remember the excitement of being sent home when your skit worked and everyone became afraid you were contagious?
Did you revel in the possibilities of a flu epidemic that would provide some really excellent away time? All of that is evidently gone in the new work place - or is it?
What’s an employee to do when illness strikes? Just pretend it isn’t there and wait for it to go away? Drag yourself into work and share the germs with colleagues and friends?
Make bets on the progress of the contagion throughout the whole organization? Does anyone have the imagery of an office full of people wearing surgical masks just to make sure the work is done?
Comments
By Droppy
October 20, 2006 10:43 AM | Link to this
People in my office abuse their sick time so frequently that it is becoming difficult to use such time when one is actually sick. Sometimes it is just easier to go into the office sick-as-a-dog than to deal with management’s game of twenty questions, proof of a doctor’s visit, mysterious phone calls at home as if to verify I’m really at home and sick … My employer basically treats people who use sick days like children playing hooky from school.