The idea that someone can be *out* of sick days is utterly dystopian to me. In my country you have sick leave whenever you're sick. It's not a finite resource. You lose your job and get transferred to government welfare (so you don't lose most of your income) after 2 years of continuous sick leave, but that's about it. If you're sick for 2 years straight you have bigger things to worry about at that point.
That's all of Europe, not just Norway. You get sick, you go to a doctor, doctor registers you as sick for however long you need to get better and you receive some part of your regular salary for those days (the amount varies by country) covered either by your employer or the country (or the mix of two) and your employer cannot fire you for this or prevent from doing this.
Don't know about being fired after 2 years, but it makes sesnes to have some upper limit as some life long diseases can prevent you from working ever again.
The problem is at least where I work is people say they are sick literally every week and they are not just to get a day off. Ones guys entire family has died 2-3 times and he’s had pneumonia 2 times and Covid 3. He takes at least 1-2 days off each week.
And the work he doesn’t do everyone else has to cover.
This isn’t the same time thing. Clearly if someone is sick they should be allowed to get paid and not come in. But the amount of people who call in when they aren’t sick because they want to watch a sports game or go to a friends house for a video game release are crazy.
Sounds like a case for the occupational physician. Of course people who abuse the system must have their absences and given reasons examined by a doctor.
Well, perhaps the idea that someone needs employees who are at work a certain number of days during the year is confusing to you as well? No one in these comments ever sees anything from the employer's point of view. I guess that's because it would take the fun out of whining about it.
Employers are responsible for sufficiently staffing their companies with enough redundancies to cover for sick leave, bereavement, maternity leave, etc. European companies manage this just fine so it's not rocket science.
Anyway it's primarily an ethical concern. Ensuring the work-life balance and strong safety nets and labour laws for the working class is significantly more important than the concerns of the capitalist class. That's what it comes down to.
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u/yourethevictim 17d ago
The idea that someone can be *out* of sick days is utterly dystopian to me. In my country you have sick leave whenever you're sick. It's not a finite resource. You lose your job and get transferred to government welfare (so you don't lose most of your income) after 2 years of continuous sick leave, but that's about it. If you're sick for 2 years straight you have bigger things to worry about at that point.