the idea that sick days somehow impose a financial burden of the company is a blatant lie of criminal proportions. It is a justification for wage theft

people should use all of their sick days

This starts in school with awards for perfect attendance

Take every single day you're entitled to. The days of working yourself to death so you get a pat on the back by the boss is well over. You come first

America is something else entirely.

LOL! Then don't offer it. Let's see who will work for you. Fuckers want to enslave people.

Wall street is the psychotic, insatiable, dehumanizing tail that wags the dog, one petulant tantrum-a-minute to the next, and the next, and the next... perpetually.
God forbid anyone in a corporate position of power try and do anything that isn't indecent and corrosively myopic, else the stampeding Dow Jones zombies go on a goddamned short-selling rampage.

But then people have been saying this for ages now, and still here we are.

EDIT: added "insatiable"

The whole reason sick days are a thing is that giving employees paid sick time costs you less when they don't come in and make other employees sick. If enough people get sick in a given org, that has a way of really impacting everything about a workplace, it really is cheaper if they stay home until they're not contagious.

The worst part of this situation, to me: that anyone is pressing for sick leave to be tightly audited, or seeking to frame its use as a sort of graft or taking from the employer, or a pretext for preemptively firing employees deemed guilty of being too sick. This kind of talk creates pressure for employees to come to work sick in order to avoid being seen as slackers or thieves, and that in turn (especially in an environment full of flu and covid variants, doubly so on the heels of a fucking pandemic so we should all know better by now) defeats the point of having sick days in the first place.

I know this couple who contracted COVID during the pandemic but refused to report it and take sick days. He - because his workplace was offering bonuses for employees who weren't taking sick days (don't remember if it was monthly or annually) and he didn't want to miss on that. She - because she already took all her sick days as PTO, without actually being sick.

I can't help but wonder if that's really what sick days are supposed to be...

Typical "back in my day" garbage. Why would you even want people to come in and spread their sickness? Wouldn't that cause even more lost production time?

Well, media controlled and owned by business. What do you expect? 😅

People shouldn’t have to work sick. If we learned one thing from Covid, shut spreads around the office.

If someone is slightly ill let them work from home or take a day off.

Why do we even hold up the charade of calling WSJ by name when it's obviously just fox news (in ownership and content) with the lightest of filters for outright insanity?

I’m baffled that people are able to see their doctor quickly enough to get a note for proof that they were sick and need time off.

Where are these easily accessible doctors?

The boot has now been completely incorporated in the throat.

I’m an older worker. I have no qualms about using all my sick days.

My work recently changed their policy, we get 48 hours sick time a year. If you use it it's counted as an occurrence against you. Three occurrences in a rolling year and you're put on disciplinary action.

Here's your new benefit ...but you better not use it.

You can't make shit like that up.

American here. Have unlimited PTO. It’s definitely not the norm but it does exist. I came from a company with only 2 weeks paid time off (total).

I hated that article. I don't need all of the charged language or opinion. Here'sthe WSJ article if y'all want to read it of note, the WSJ isn't really making a determination here. Mostly just quoting out of touch executives and labor firms.

I'm all for work reform but how this comes back on the Wall Street Journal is beyond me.

In this thread: Americans bragging that not only have they never used a sick day, they used their lunchbreak to go back and wrestle the bear for their severed arm which they then reattached with staples they paid for themselves so they could put in a full afternoon of work.

Cool pro-tip that sometimes works to get around the WSJ paywall, especially if you use DDG. Search for the title of the WSJ article and put “msn” after.

It will sometimes send you to Bing’s google Amp-like (ugh, I know) MSN news site where there is no paywall.

Yeah, well fuck them. I used up my one week's worth of sick days and all of my PTO and am now on FMLA because I'm dealing with an illness that is causing me to miss work. What the fuck am I supposed to do? They told me to go on FMLA.

Know the laws for your state. Most of the states in the union are fucked, but some at least have something on the books.

https://www.patriotsoftware.com/blog/payroll/state-mandated-paid-sick-leave-laws/

Also, remember that paid sick leave is different from paid vacation. In many states, unused paid vacation must be paid upon termination, many times regardless of the reason for the termination. Unfortunately, my state is absolute trash and does not provide any protections for workers' rights or hold employers accountable for a damn thing. Hope this helps someone else though.

https://ask.legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.info/cc-nto-vacation-rolling-pl

What kind of company doesn't insure against sickness of their employees? When I mentioned I was sick a lot, my boss at the time laughed and told me the company gets an insurance payment if I'm out, so not to worry. Fyi, I'm in Europe.

Great article in terms of calling out the sentiment, but their analysis is really dumb.

Just to be clear: the idea that sick days somehow impose a financial burden of the company is a blatant lie of criminal proportions. It is a justification for wage theft — the most common and most costly form of burglary in America. Sick days are part of an employees' compensation package; therefore, sick days are just another form of money owed to the workers. If a company is spending the money that it legally and contractually owes to a worker

Not only is this not accurate whatsoever, as companies are not required to pay you for unused sick time (thus making it not wage theft - also it isn't wage theft to complain - but the money isn't contractually owed at all).

What makes this truly bad though is that employers that do pay out for unused sick time see way fewer incidences of "sick time as general PTO," and workers actually get their full comp, and should be a standard across all employers. They literally skip over the thing that would be better for workers and employers, in their analysis.

If a worker wants to trade pay for time off, that should be their right. They should also be paid for the time off they don't take, as it is indeed factored into employee comp on the corporate level.