2. It’s not always about the worker. A simple cold to one person can be very serious in an immuno-suppressed person that might be in contact with the worker. There was a grad student in my lab who had lupus and was on immunosuppressive drugs. A simple cold could mean an emergency trip to the hospital. A bad case of flu could mean a week in the ICU – or worse – death.

The lack of proper or even “accepted” sick leave can have serious consequences that have ramifications far beyond the individual employees health or the need of the employer to have even sick workers on the job. The answer; PAID sick leave for ALL. Anything less is simply not civilized.

And yes, America does exploit its working poor quite effectively.

Basically, sick leave is treated by some as vacation-plus (you don’t even have to book it in advance!) but most with serious (or semi-serious) ambitions to move upwards throuhg their careers take only what they need (and would feel no shame at all about declaring 10 days leave in a 2-5 year period).

Also, the main benefit, from my view, is that you know it is there, so aren’t as worried about getting sick.

Are you aware of the existence of hourly workers? Are you aware they receive no pay when they do not clock in for work, absent leave or vacation policies to the contrary? Did you realize hourly workers account for roughly half of the labor force?

Is this a serious statement? After a year of healthcare “debate,” you are still uncertain where the U.S. falls in the ranking of healthcare outcomes?

maybe mandated sick days should be covered like a sick day from public school…i.e., bring a doctors note proving your illness. the nanny state could certainly muster up coverage for that?

But there really isn’t any effective way to police sick days off. The commonest brief illnesses (colds, “stomach viruses”, low back pain, migraine headaches, etc.) typically have little or nothing in the way of findings on physical examination, or even in lab tests (which there would be no reason to order for these diagnoses anyway). So making people get a “doctor’s note” just wastes time and money.

I’ll say it again: if a company has a problem with too many people taking off too much sick time, the most effective thing they can do is retrain or replace onerous managers. Poor managers are the cause of excessive sick time.

I am not sure about that question of intention. Remember, there is a feedback cycle here. Employers know that a certain number of sick days are taken without physical illness, yet they continue to offer a set number of sick days, and do not police occasional “sick” days off.

As you point out, the number of days per year one is sick is not very predictable. What sense does it make to give an employee a predefined number of sick days? It does make sense to give a predefined number of vacation days. In effect, then, sick days are really days off, but both employees and employers get to pretend otherwise. It is one of those social arrangements that everybody knows, but nobody talks about.

Furthermore, like store coupons, sick days are not all cashed in. For one thing, many employees believe that they should actually be ill to take a sick day. Even those who take an occasional “sick” day off may be afraid to take too many, in case they actually become sick. So the employer can appear to be more generous with sick days than he actually is.

In addition, if there is an employee that the employer wants to get rid of, abuse of sick days may possibly give a pretext.

How about abolishing both the fed and the chamber of commerce?

UTTER NONSENSE! Ever hear of an oversupplied labor market? Maybe you should personally experience it.