Aotearoa / New Zealand

Though another thing to consider is that, at least in my jobs, when the 5 days were exhausted, you just ate annual leave days when you were sick - or you just brought the bug into the office.

I think it's this. We always just powered through it.

About a decade ago I developed a sudden severe illness when I was on contract work with a certain University.

After my 5 days were used up the University simply started docking 20% of my weekly pay for every day I was not able to come in.

(Looking back on it, it was deeply unethical of them because I was not full time staff and they were docking me 20% even for days when I had no mandated hours. I was in no fit state to argue.)

On the days when I actually had work hours, whenever it was even remotely possible I was dragging myself in to work and crawling around trying to do my job, because others depended on me. In that industry it's just what you do if work won't cover you.

I was fainting, collapsing, falling over, crawling on the floor, all sorts of stuff. Or no pay. But that was just our culture back then. Presenteeism.

Any step away from that is a step in the right direction.

I wonder if anything changed in the last few years? Like, hypothetically a large proportion of the population surviving a novel virus with lingering health impacts? No? Not ringing any bells?

Yeah, if you aren't tracking annual leave taken as sick leave then of course sick leave will go up when entitlement goes up. The reason it hasn't gone up a whole lot may be that there were already many employers offering more sick leave because 5 is clearly not enough. I've worked at places with 10 or 15 days sick leave, and I know at least one big bank has an unlimited sick leave policy.

"Some of the workforce - we don't know how much - but some of the workforce see the 10 days as an entitlement and so we were expecting to see an increase, and we have," Astwick said.

This is just total reckons with fuck all to back it up, he admits as such but still comes to his predetermined conclusion. What an utter ghoul

This just strikes me that HR & management probably focus on days sick leave taken because its an easy thing to count rather than somehow trying to account for mid & long-term productivity across a period which is difficult to measure.

But also, the average between 2012-2020 was over a period where there was no global pandemic happening. People might want to pretend that in 2022 covid was over, but that's just wishful retrospective thinking, it still happening, and even if folks don't have to isolate now if you're too sick to work, you're too sick to work.

I work for a company that has unlimited sick leave, it's fantastic and I have never once seen it be abused. People tend to take time off when they're crook and work from home when they're feeling better but are still potentially infectious.

It works well.