Mandatory Sick Pay

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by mookiemookie

Employers need to realize that people have lives outside of work. If an employee needs to take a sick day for whatever reason (waiting for the air conditioner guy to come, pipes in your house burst, ate a bad burrito the night before) it shouldn't be a financial burden upon them.

Wait...it shouldn't be a financial burden upon who? The employees? What about the employers?

[Aramike]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Wait...it shouldn't be a financial burden upon who? The employees? What about the employers?

Exactly.

I think part of the problem is the common misconception that business owners are wealthy people. Sure, they probably make more than their employees - when times are good. However, they also assume the risks and incur the greatest losses when times are bad.

Most business owners are simply middle class people with families to support, a mortgage or two, and a sense of the American dream. Why is it okay for them to suffer the financial impact of both their OWN health and the health of their employees?

[Stealhead]

This is a pretty good one. I spent 12 years in the Air force where you get 0 "sick days" you either appear on time for duty or will be punished. Of course we have sick call and in most cases I saw the person either show up or called the SNCO and requested they be allowed to report to sick call. If the doctor finds that you have an illness you are given orders from him to either not report for duty for a given time or perform light duty.And in the worst case be given a prescribed number of days of convalscent leave.(reciving full pay during this time)

I like this system as it keeps someone who is truly ill and could spread sickness or harm themselves from performing thier duty and or exposing others. I guess in the civilian world you cant really have a system like this which is why most places either give x number of sick days per year(after one has completed thier probationary peroid) or some give as per August some of both.And everyone must admit sometimes nothing is wrong at all with you but you just dont want to work once in a while for some reason nothing wrong with this its the people who feel this way all the time that f... it up.

The other side of this coin is when someone is sick but they cant get a "paid" sick day and they need the money they show up likely making other people get sick harming the effectiveness of the work force and therfore costing the employees and the employer.I guess it depends on the person in this case do they not work and lose out on the money or risk putting someone else in the same boat.I myself would stay home sans pay though i pretty much never get sick at all which means swine flu will either kill my ass or I will be immune to it as I seem to be to every other thing out there.i played in the dirt and mud alot when I was a kid I always knew it would do me some good.

I also for the record consider my self far from being either a Dem. or a Rep. I dont really like to tell anyone what to do and that is what both of these parties love to do so you can say that I am a Libertarian! Live Free Or Die!

I think the pole should be simply Yes or No as well as it is now it forces ones hand.

Though if a judge questions the legality...

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Aramike

Exactly.

I think part of the problem is the common misconception that business owners are wealthy people. Sure, they probably make more than their employees - when times are good. However, they also assume the risks and incur the greatest losses when times are bad.

Most business owners are simply middle class people with families to support, a mortgage or two, and a sense of the American dream. Why is it okay for them to suffer the financial impact of both their OWN health and the health of their employees?

Agreed. If a company wants to offer sick leave as part of the compensation, fine. They can probably attract better employees that way. But I don't think we need Big Brother to dictate it.

I'm just thinking out loud but it seems very narcissistic to call in sick when one isn't and to show up when one is.

I have been called a narcissist/egomaniac myself, but I can hardly be compaired with the mythical narcissus, when I am so obviously more akin to Zeus.

[Stealhead]

Well I suppose that someone is being narcissistic when they do that but that does not mean they are a bad person or a full time narco. All though a few weeks ago my daughter was satying at the Grands house and my wife and I decided to "uh" take the off.

Though both our employers allow personal days so that is what we did. If I was unable to do this Id have claimed a sick day.I have a very strong work ethic but I also belive that you must define yourself as person through more than your job some day you will have to retire from it and then what do you have?.Sometimes I pick one part of my over all "ethics" over one part of them.


Zeus is the "God of Gods" so in that light I suppose that means that Zeus can do what ever he wants sort of.

[porphy]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Wait...it shouldn't be a financial burden upon who? The employees? What about the employers?

As I see it, this is a financial burden that should be shared. Sickness, if genuine and severe enough to stop doing your work properly or risking others health at work, is something that happens. No one is at fault, everyone is at the receiving end some way or the other. No one can foresee if you're going to be sick or not. Some are more sick, other less so.

So why not settle for a solution where the individual employee get in part paid sick leave and the employers pay some of the salary for the sick days. This way it is a loss for both, but it is an arrangement that acknowledges that the relationship between an employer and employee is usually more than a day to day exchange of money and time. You can also start with an unpaid qualifying day for the employee to weed out the long weekends, as the company often do risk aspects of the whole business, rather than only lost work time from an individual.

All in all, I'm in favour of a mandatory basic solution, which of course companies and employees then can make additions to through insurance, company rules, etc.

cheers porphy

[Platapus]

In my company, we have unlimited Sick time. No one abuses it. The rational is that if the company treats us like professionals, the employees act like professionals.

Even with unlimited Sick time, we still have to force people to go home when they is illin.

I guess different companies have different operating environments.

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Aramike

Most large corporations already have some form of paid time off. So guess who this hits?

Small businesses, of course. And who's going to pay for the business owner's sick days?

If it's mandated that EVERY business has paid sick time then EVERYONE gets hit equally, so save me the "think of the small businesses!" sob story. They are on equal footing if the law is applied equally across all businesses. I have no problem taking away the competitive advantage of a business owner who runs a sweatshop and forces their sick employees to work to save a buck.

From a pragmatic standpoint, paid sick leave helps stop the spread of sickness. At my job (where we get paid sick days) you're considered pretty rude if you come in to the office while you're sick. From a business owner's standpoint, ask yourself if you'd rather have one employee out sick and have to pay them, or have 20 employees all sick and at work because they need the money, but inefficient because you didn't want to pay them. Not to mention the societal costs at large of spreading an infectious illness amongst workers, then amongst workers families, friends, etc. That business owner is imposing his cost savings for not paying the employee to stay home on the rest of society by causing the infection of and lowering the efficiency of a multitude of people who otherwise may not have been exposed to illness.

In today's world of laptop computers, VPNs, teleconferencing and ubiquitous internet access, I'm sure the employee could do their critical job tasks from home while preventing the spread of disease. The net loss in productivity would be negligible, and it wouldn't increase costs because you would have been paying those people to come in to work anyways.

UnderseaLcpl, you bring up the idea of making us uncompetitive on the world stage. In reality, mandating sick leave would align us with the rest of the world:



The dark blue line is mandated sick leave, the light blue is mandated sick days.

So therefore I don't see how this would put us on unequal footing with the rest of the world.

[UnderseaLcpl]

I knew you'd come up with something good, Mark
It would appear that I misstated myself. I should have said "less competitive" rather than "uncompetitive". It seems that we are behind the curve in mandated sick leave, at least.

Still, I don't consider that a reason to implement such a system. It could hardly be argued that mandating sick days is somehow going to increase productivity. As you said yourself, the days could be used to wait for the AC repairman or whatever, and I think that is how most people will use them. That's certainly the case in a lot of companies with mandated benefits of that nature, as I said before.

If it's mandated that EVERY business has paid sick time then EVERYONE gets hit equally, so save me the "think of the small businesses!" sob story. They are on equal footing if the law is applied equally across all businesses. I have no problem taking away the competitive advantage of a business owner who runs a sweatshop and forces their sick employees to work to save a buck.

I also disagree with this. For a small business with only a handful of employees, mandated sick leave is more harmful than to large companies, as Aramike said. Small businesses typically don't maintain a reserve of employees or temps to fill in, and unexpected absences may neccessitate paying overtime to other employees to fill the gaps, not to mention continuing to pay the absent employee. For a business that nets only 100k anually, that adds up fast.

Furthermore, if you're working in a sweatshop, odds are you're not making much anyway, and so already qualify for many exsisting compensation benefits, including Federal unemployment and various types of medical assistance. Even if you lose your lousy job, there are plenty of others out there, even now.

The more I look at this, the more I think it is just another case of wanting something for nothing, and passing the expense along to people who actually produce things and make responsible fiscal decisions. Every fool on the planet knows that you should save money for unexpected circumstances and not live beyond your means. Just because they choose not to do so doesn't mean that all employers should have to pay for their short-sightedness.

[Aramike]

Okay, so if this is about fairness...

Who guarantees the financial well-being of the business owner when his health becomes an issue? Or is he just screwed by the fact that he decided to create jobs rather than simply take one?