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Nearly half the workforce has taken sick time during the summer months even though they weren't sick, according to a survey.
Some people have a hard time keeping their minds on work when the sun’s shining outside, and that can lead to summer hooky.
Nearly half the workforce has taken sick time during the summer months even though they weren’t sick, according to a June online survey by Monster.com of about 1,400 employees.
The Monster poll found that 8 percent said they frequently called in sick from work in order to enjoy the summer, and 11 percent said they did it occasionally.
We all work hard. What’s wrong with taking a Monday off to extend your summer weekend?
That kind of thinking got one major employment law firm to send an advisory out to workers thinking of taking summertime sick time.
“We sent a letter out to our federal employees that especially this time of year, agency managers are looking at how employees are using their leave time,” said John Mahoney, an attorney for Tully Rinckey, that specializes in federal employment law. They’re looking for strange sick-time patterns, he explained, such as taking a lot of Mondays off sick after three day weekends.
September is the end of the fiscal year for the government, he continued, and given that budgets are tight, agency heads “get serious about taking action against employees who engage in this conduct.”
Mahoney pointed to a U.S. Treasury study that looked at IRS workers in 2005 and 2006 and found they used over 15 million hours of sick leave, for an estimated cost of $450 million in lost productivity.
That’s why, given recent budgetary restraints, government heads are starting to crack down on leave abuse, more so than in the 1990s, he added.
Sick days can be expensive for all types of employers, and there is no federal requirement in this country to provide paid sick time. Only about six in 10 workers in the private sector have paid sick leave, compared to nine out of 10 government workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Tough times in the public and private sectors have led to little tolerance for abuse of sick time, and during the Great Recession, workers actually reduced the number of sick days they were taking ... until recently.
In the first quarter, the absenteeism rate experienced a modest uptick, after plunging to record lows in 2009 and 2011, according to a Bloomberg BNA report released in May.
While still below pre-recession levels, Matthew Sottong, director, surveys and research reports for Bloomberg BNA, said the increase could be a sign that workers are feeling a bit more secure in their jobs and willing to put in for sick time.
He expected the job-absence rate to continue to climb, but couldn’t say whether it’s because people are getting sick more often, or just abusing their leave benefits.
Whatever the reason, he said, “If this economic recovery does prove to create jobs, we’ll see people a little more apt to let go of their insecurities and take the time off.”
Sottong may be onto something. In some nations where the economy is growing faster than the United States, workers are more inclined to take those fake sick days.
A global study by The Workforce Institute at Kronos found that China was at the top of the list when it came to countries where employees admitted to playing hooky most.
In China, 71 percent of workers said they called in sick with out being sick; compared to India at 62 percent; Australia at 58 percent; Canada and the United States at 52 percent; the UK at 43 percent; Mexico at 38 percent and France with 16 percent.
Who would have thought the French would be more diligent than American workers?
Or maybe it’s because we need more time off. In France, workers typically get 30 days off for vacation, compared to 14 days for U.S. employees, according to an Expedia 2011 vacation study.
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supervisors,
The biggest clue on sick leave abuse is the employee will drag their act into work when they are truely sick. Spreading colds and flu among the healthy employees like some kind of right to work while ill. Banking up sick leave hours to use as needed when they want. Then they call in sick - capturing more holiday weekend time or extending vacation times. These type of people look at annual leave and sick leave as one and the same. Keep and easy to look at one sheet paper with twelve months on it and highlight days with two kinds colors of days off scheduled leave and days off sick. Then during the apprasial period use that tool to talk the subject out. Remember most employess are great employees. It is the ten percent that take the ninety percent of the supervisors time. From there (if you spot a pattern) work with HR and the union steward if you have one and request their help. Having the rest of the work force pull the lamn along (Filling in for the work for the msssing employee) just ticks them off if you let the sick leave abuser get away with it. Employees look to YOU to keep everyone on balance.
Good Luck, and buy American
Except the article exaggerates something that's not that pervasive. Most workers don't even use all their paid sick time. The biggest problem is the lousy sick time policies of American companies, the REAL culprit of why sick employees are often forced to go into work while being sick with the threat of being fired.
I worked at a place where everytime an employee took off on a Monday, another worker in the same area would take a "retaliatory" day off just to piss off the other workers. omg I hated that place.
Our "sick time" amounts to (5) paid sick days a year, and it's "Use it or LOSE it". I'm rarely actually sick, so like many people in my company, I use most of mine on nice days rather than throw it away. It's their policy, and if they want to avoid this behavior, it would behoove them to let us roll over or cash out the time rather than lose it!
There are more than 40 million workers in this country who are not thinking about extending their weekends to enjoy the sunshine because they can’t earn a single paid sick day to use to when they have the flu, or strep, or to recover from injury – and millions more don’t have paid sick days to care for an ill child. The problem is not that a small percentage of employees abuse this basic right; it’s that tens of millions of hardworking people in the United States don’t have it. And, as a result, they are too often forced to choose between their families’ health and the jobs they desperately need. For them, earning paid sick days is about survival, not playing hooky.
I get 12 paid sick days per year, but I only use them when actually sick. Since there's 12 paid holidays, and 15 days vacation, plus annual rollover of vacation, I feel no need to take extra time off. Add in the fact that I like my job, it's not bad. That, and I also get every other Friday off thanks to the alternating schedule system (80 hours over 9 days).
We have generic Paid Time Off. I dont need to lie to take a day off. Its nice to be treated like a grown up.
There are always a few folks who abuse policies. But making policy for the rest of us simply to prevent them from acting unethically isn't the right approach. For the 80% of low-wage workers in my state (Oregon) who don't earn a single paid sick day while they work, there can be dire consequences - like school-age kids being left at school when sick because their parents can't afford to take the time off from work to pick them up (or fear being disciplined or losing their job!), restaurant diners being served by sick cooks and waiters, and hard-working folks not able to get to the doctor before it's too late/a condition worsens or they wind up in the much-more-expensive emergency room. A national paid sick days policy should be a basic labor standard so that workers can make responsible choices about their own and their family's health while still being good employees. The way it works now, good people are being forced to make an impossible choice. Plus, there are clear business benefits like: reduced turnover, higher morale, healthy clients and coworkers. And it doest't cost much when the average number of paid sick days workers use hovers around 3. The abusers are just news makers, not the norm. A basic, reasonable paid sick days requirement (like the proposed Healthy Families Act) is a win-win for workers, businesses, and our communities. Because in the end, the old "good for workers = bad for business" paradigm just doesn't hold. A policy like paid sick days can be good for both.
The US has almost no holidays in the summer when the weather is good. Why is that??
Most of our holidays are from October to February.
Sounds like a bunch of companies make money doing research for the sake research,does'nt meen it's good research or that it's very usefull or even true it's just research for the sake of research, if you want to call it that. As far as people taking time off during the summer months, everyone with a couple of grey cells to rub together , that you really don't want to take time off during a blizzard or a hail storm. What we might waht to look at is the amount of stress everyone is under because of the financial strain we have been put under due to the lack of any type of leadership in Washington both governmental and civilian. Maybe we should look at how much time our elected official have been off their job since they took office. that's what I would call absenteeism or maybe we should call that fraud against the tax-paying public. That should be worth jail time.
Now we have Dick Chenney telling us that Mitt Romney would be best in another 9/11 incident,I think his doctors should check his blood pressure and his new pacemaker cause his brain is not working right and his mouth is moving again, hope no one is going hunting with him.
Many employers have gone to a paid time off system where you get an allotment of time off, and you use it for sick days, or vacation, or whatever. It removes incentive to "use up" sick days even if you aren't sick, and it rewards people who rarely need sick days with more vacation time.