My former boss always said, if you’re sick, take a day more off. Would be a problem if half the company got sick.
It’s in europe tho. Has it swapt over finally?
I don’t get paid sick time I can use my PTO. Would I rather be sick and miserable at work(in which my day already sucks)and be paid and using my rest and relaxation time for something I want or do I use one of my 10 PTO days and cancel my vacation I may have already booked since I only have 10 days off a year 2-3 days I have to use for federal holidays since I don’t get paid off since I am contracted with the bank but my company doesn’t pay me for the holiday.
Damn you people in the default country are insane.
I only know the world where everyone takes paid sick days. And usually it’s more like a week.
Maybe you should rename the community into “Work Reform USA”?
“Default Country” is my new favorite way to describe the US.
It definitely applies to reddit/lemmy. But also often to YouTube content etc.
If we’re lucky enough to get vacation days, many of us are encouraged to only take 2 adjacent days to the weekend off. Month long vacations like Europe? Never. 4 days off in a row, normal.
So, should you fight for a work reform, or should you figure out why even your more left leaning party when in power does jack shit about it, and whether it’s really a democracy problem, or a national culture problem, or if maybe your solution is to move to a different democracy where the majority is aligned more with your core beliefs.
Or maybe I should daily start posting about working conditions in lithium mines in Africa and call for a work reform? Ah, that won’t get upvotes.
Is this something I’m too European to understand?
Yes. American work culture is bonkers. Most places have a limited number of sick days, if they have health PTO at all. In my experience, if they offer it it’s usually 2 weeks worth, as if people are capable of controlling how often and how long they’re sick for.
Before the Rona times, people would legit flex on how dedicated they were to their jobs that they didn’t see their families as much. That’s not a joke. The work culture in the states has been absolutely toxic for ages. I’m fucking stoked it’s changing.
I get 10 days a year on a sliding window. So if I call in sick in June, I won’t get that day back until June. It’s bullshit.
From my experience, it is everyone, regardless of age. COVID changed things.
For some people perhaps. I sadly still go to an office occasionally and I’m astonished that there are people clearly unwell coughing and sneezing all over the place. Last time I went I came back with Covid and was out for nearly a week.
I’ve started wearing a mask if I’m feeling sick, which was unthinkable before 2020.
Every company I have worked for has explicitly encouraged using sick days. Specifically so the person doesn’t bring whatever bug into the office and sharing it around, causing multiple people to get sick and take time off
The argument against sick days is fucking bonkers to me. You want people to come in and get the rest of the office sick?? One of the many many reasons I prefer working from home.
I got a bad cold or something one time. I spent 2 weeks working from home then the boss told me to go to a doctor. Went and they found nothing so I had to come in. 1.5 weeks later I was over it but not before the rest of the office got pissed at me for getting them sick. I just told them I was forced to come in.
That’s the problem with Gen Z: they don’t want to SHARE
GEN Z IS KILLING WORKING YOURSELF TO DEATH
It’s not even that.
In an office setting sick days literally help productivity, because metrics and workload should account for employee’s work hours.
If someone’s on leave for a day, theyre taken out of production numbers.
If they “tough it out” then production numbers say they should produce a normal days workload.
You end up looking worse encouraging a work culture where people don’t take days off.
If someone’s on leave for a day, theyre taken out of production numbers.
Ha! Good one
I don’t agree with measuring productivity that way. Coworker recently had covid, but they still worked from home. Granted, they put in maybe half the hours they would normally. But, boss was good with it as the alternative was zero work done at all. They still got some work done without burning any sick days.
I’m a millennial and can’t remember the last time I was too sick to work from home. Sick means I’m somehow contagious and shouldn’t be in office, but I can still get some work done. I haven’t taken a sick day in over a decade, just a work from home day. I work in software so I guess that makes it easy compared to other professions.
Yeah that doesn’t work for kitchen staff.
Count your blessings. I’ve been sick enough to mute my work call while vomiting. (They needed me that day, and mostly I just needed to be on that call.)
But I’ve absolutely had days where I couldn’t get far out of bed.
How does it work in the US? Do you have a limited amount of sick days? It sounds like it in every article I read about it… Or is this dependent on the employer?
Also dependent on the state. Some states mandate minimum sick leave, others don’t. Then there’s the issue of paid vs unpaid: if you’re living paycheck to paycheck it doesn’t matter if you have all the unpaid sick leave in the world, you’re not going to use it because you literally can’t afford to.
You don’t get any federally?! Damn, I don’t want to complain too much as a Canadian but you guys are really bringing us down.
The part you specifically asked about is a big nope.
Currently in the United States, federal law doesn’t guarantee workers a single paid day off, and many aren’t even entitled to unpaid time off.
I’m generally not surprised by this kind of thing anymore but I still wonder: how??
I see, thank you.
All about the employer.
It varies greatly. There’s also the “lump sum payout” people consider at some jobs.
Some places don’t cap how much sick leave you can carry over year to year, and then when you leave they pay it at a reduced rate. So especially coming up on retirement, some people dont take it to increase that payout. Others do the opposite and use all they can at the end because then it’s full pay.
Like most things in America it’s overly complicated and everyone’s job handles it differently
Totally employer dependent. Some places give you sick days and want you to use them if needed, some give you them and will absolutely throw you out if you use them, some don’t give you any, some people want you to use your PTO for sick time.
Horrible…
Surgical tech here. We have a couple boomer nurses (nurses… y’know… people who’ve taken microbiology and made it through nursing school… FUCK!) who think coming in to work when they’re sick is some kind of display of godlike work ethic.
One of those fuckers came in with a stomach flu or some shit last fall, and proceeded to infect pretty much the entire department and who knows how many patients.
We had so many call-ins through the following week or so, that we literally had to cancel a TON of surgeries because we just didn’t have the staff to do them.
Good job, Nurse Karen. You really are a rockstar for sucking it up and coming in even when you didn’t feel good… all it cost was stabbing your entire team in the stomach, costing the hospital probably a few hundred thousand in lost revenue (then again, that shit should be free anyway, so, honestly fuck the hospital), and maybe killed a patient or two after coming to us when their body is already fucked to the point of needing to cut it open to fix something - yeah they don’t have the same immune system we do.
Shit pisses me off. If you’re sick, stay the fuck at home!
Covid taught me that a nurse’s education is wholly inadequate. I also think they may be becoming irrelevant with so many specialized techs.
I’m actually in nursing school right now - trying to switch over to the dark side!
From what I’ve seen so far, at least judging entirely by the program I’m in / the half of it I’ve progressed through, the education side is fine.
When I first became a tech, one of my culture-shocks way early on going into the medical field was that there are people at all levels who are just fucking stupid. Even doctors, who you’d assume are just all-around really intelligent people, are susceptible to the same bullshit that tricked grandpa into posting anti-vaxx rants on facebook.
The kicker is that none of us are really ‘all around’ good or bad at anything. Aforementioned doctor might know the absolute shit out orthopedics because that’s what he studied; but the instant your orthopedic doc sticks his toe outside of that very specific bubble, crank the skepticism up to 11, even when it’s other medical topics… Dr. Bones starts ranting about epidemiology and I’m going to assume he got his education on that topic from Fox and twitter memes.
Covid taught us that education takes a back-burner to values. If jeebus says vaccines are demon jizz, then vaccines are demon jizz. And the bar for the later is fucking low. Like, if a news anchor says a preecher said the vaccines are demon jizz… yup, they’re demon jizz! Whether or not it’s an actual part of you religion or w/e doesn’t matter (still waiting to see the part in scripture that says “covid vax bad; the other 500 vax you’ve gotten so far were all fine”), so long as some charismatic bobblehead confidently says it’s against your religion, suddenly it’s against your religion. Even if you’ve studied vaccines and know better “naw all those scientists lied. This new info is coming straight from GOD!”
…and the depressing part… dafuq do we do about it? We can’t just fire Nurse Karen for spreading pathogens and misinformation - Nurse Karen is thousands of people, and every one of them is plenty good at starting IVs and typing shit into a chart and such. Take them all out of the equation, and every single hospital there is just became short-staffed to the point of complete dysfunction. We need those dumb fucking monkeys to keep putting needles in veins, so we just collectively tolerate all the bullshit that comes with them.
I hate it.
There’s stupid people everywhere. The idea is that we can’t fool proof everything but we can promote change in attitude. There are no infallible people. I’ve met them all, engineers, doctors, politicians, millionaires, everyone has the potential for being utterly stupid at topics they aren’t even aware they are ignorant about.
One of the early jobs in my career was providing help desk tech support specifically to a group of nearby hospitals. Prior to that, I thought that - as you said - many or most medical professionals had an above average general intelligence by default. This job killed that theory.
The most prominent example I can recall is that of spending seventeen minutes on the phone trying to explain where to find a semicolon on the keyboard. Not what a semicolon is or how to use it or its function, just what it looked like and where it was on the keyboard. For seventeen minutes. At the end I think we gave up and found another approach. Obviously - again, as you said - their knowledge is specialized and I couldn’t do their job, but this and many other examples seemed pretty egregious.
That said, I’ve had a decent number of medical emergencies in my life and, while I’ve found a few doctors and nurses to be personally offensive, they’ve always seemed to do their job very competently and I’ve always, always appreciated them being there. Hopefully that demonstrates that the above example was an outlier.
My vacation days are capped, but my sick days are not. I’ll take my sick days when I retire.
I’m a manager and it infuriates me when I hear someone bragging about not talking sick days and coming in when they aren’t feeling well. Even before the pandemic that seemed pretty stupid and I argued against it. How anyone still thinks it’s a good idea is beyond me. If you want or need to work, fine, do it from home. Don’t come in and make other people have to deal with being sick.
It’s especially stupid where I am because sick time is discretionary by manager, and there’s no cap. So it’s not like anyone is going to run out of it.
I feel like religion/conservatism plays a role in this mindset. There’s a lot of pride in self-sacrifice and at least appearing “strong” in the face of adversity even if it’s regarding your health. Not that I agree with it at all. I’m all for unlimited such days and self-care.
