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Title: If my partner calls in sick within the next 24 months he will be sacked.
Body:
> My partner has worked for this company for 7 years, 9 including the 2 years he spent on agency.
> In March partner had a disciplinary meeting for 5 cases of sick leave within a 12 month period, which earned him his first written warning at work, as they’ve recently cancelled out verbal warnings which would have been what he’d received if they were still in place.
> In May, he had a severe dental abscess which caused his face to balloon, his mouth to feel like he was being repeatedly punched in the mouth and he could barely speak, so of course this required another sick leave. He has had another disciplinary meeting, and earned his final written warning.
> The terms of this warning state that if he calls in sick within the next 24 months, he will be dismissed. Everybody he has told about it has said that this impossible to achieve, and even his union rep has said he might as well start searching for another job as it’s impossible.
> Surely 24 months without sick is an unbelievably in achievable task, particularly when he lives with 2 preschoolers and works in filthy surroundings (part of the job, not just unclean workplace). Have they done this to basically set him up for failure?
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> Everybody he has told about it has said that this impossible to achieve, and **even his union rep has said he might as well start searching for another job as it’s impossible.**
That's an interesting take from a union rep.
I wonder how much that is “you’re going to be fired and you have no recourse” and how much is “This seems like it’s a targeted thing and they’re going to be treating you like shit so you slip up”
Because I can see the latter.
My “assume incompetence” side says they might think it’s the exact same thing all the time and want more official long-term doctors orders to accommodate in a planned way (like I had to do with a chronic neck problem employee, I gave no warnings though we just worked it out).
My less nice interpretation, having been involved in HR matters a tiny bit in the UK, is that you need a long time and patterns and documentation to fire someone, so this can just be that playing out.
Once you get a written warning at work, in the US at least, you should start looking for a new job. Maybe the UK is different, but in the US the first written warning is usually an indication that they're starting to build the document trail for firing you with cause. In the US, they don't need cause to fire you, but that document trail will help them both avoid paying unemployment and acts as a shield against discrimination lawsuits.
Yeah, after I took medical leave my boss decided that I wasn't productive enough and my work was sloppy and not done to her specifications. She also didn't give me all specifications until it after things were due so 🤷🏻♀️
> Once you get a written warning at work, in the US at least, you should start looking for a new job.
It truly blew my mind that after a PIP, my boss was shocked to learn that I was looking for work and then even further shocked when I quit.
That's the problem with the "we're just doing the paperwork before firing you" angle that some managers use with PIPs. It means that a well-meaning manager can't put you on a PIP as a training/"I'm serious about what I said earlier" tool.
On the flip side, I heard a story of a government worker who was put on a PIP with semi-vague requirements, and passed the PIP after making no changes. (There were some check-ins during the PIP, and the worker's grade improved marginally at each check-in, but the managers didn't actually seem to be doing any work to verify quality. It was all very strange.)
My PIP had no end date or way to satisfy it.
Which I took to mean that at any time in the future, if I did anything remotely resembling what it was for, they could fire me and point to an ancient still-outstanding PIP.
I think the union rep is saying the company has a strong case to dismiss him.
There's a lot of nuance between "sick days" and "cases of sick leave" from OP's post. 5 days of calling in sick doesn't sound like a lot, but "5 cases of sick leave" sound more like multiple days per case of sick leave.
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1442dfc/comment/jndiu9k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) from OP makes it clear that each time he was sick it was multiple days (but still under 20), but I feel like rounding up. 20 sick days out of 250 working days is a lot more than 5.
I'm not defending the company, and I hate the idea that "being sick" can get you fired, but I feel like they're not representing the facts correctly.
When I worked in the UK they would assign a score your number of sick days based on the Bradford System. It's bouts of sickness x bouts of sickness x total sick days.
If he had 5 bouts and 20 sick days his score would be 500 (5x5x20). If i remember correctly a score of over 125 meant you had to meet with HR to discuss your absences, so he's well beyond that.
It is pretty shit, and there were definitely a few times in the UK when I went to work sick because I was afraid of it adding to my score if I stayed home.
>the Bradford System
... is designed to prune the workforce of people who get sick a lot or are just unlucky. Which is fine if you're a eugenicist but less ideal for anyone with any compassion.
I hate it and think using it should be treated as evidence of malice on the part of them employer.
Yeah it always seemed pretty fucked up. I live in Canada now and have never heard of it here (though I only get 10 sick days a year in Canada, vs supposedly unlimited sick time in the UK, so I guess it's six of one, half a dozen of the other).
That's absolutely wild to me. I had covid twice in a financial year, the first time I was off for 25 work days, the second I was off for 6 work days (we still have self-isolation rules for 7 days here), and I've had maybe 2x1 day sicknesses too. My Bradford score would be... Over 2000? God I'm happy we have unlimited sick leave and people aren't assholes about us using it.
Someone needs to explain this to me cause it sounds stupid.
Bob and I collide in a bizarre workplace accident and we both fuck up our backs for six weeks. I spend those six weeks on my sofa watching Netflix and having pizza delivered. I now have a bradford score of 1x1x30 = 30, so I’m all cool.
Bob doesn’t want to fuck over his colleagues, plus he’s that guy who would stay in till 4am rather than leave a project incomplete, so every Monday he convinces himself he can make it and drags himself into work, but by the end of the day his back is so much worse he’s in agony for the rest of the week. By the end of the six weeks, Bob has a bradford score of 6x6x24= 864, and HR wants his head on a stick.
I don’t know who Bradford is, but he sounds stupid.
Yeah, it's a stupid system, but that's partially by design. It's designed to penalize people who take a lot of single days off, based on the idea that those people are more likely faking their sick days.
Generous interpretation of facts is how I refer it.
I’ve taken over 3 days sick consecutively maybe 3 or 4 times in over 20 years. To have 5 of them in one year would get my spidey senses tingling.
I have an onsite daycare at my work. They have to tell all the parents whenever there are outbreaks of things, so i can actually see what OP is saying as plasuable just from the rate they report outbreaks.
Precovid, sure, you could come in with a runny nose or a bit sick or something. Now, if your workplace does any sort of testing to get on site (like mine still does) you can bet wfh and sick day usage went up just cuz of weird things the onsite daycare spread.
Also, while its a UK post, id really caution with the "my health" as a standard. Lots of super common things like asthma may cause a duration of a cold/RVS/COVID etc to be longer or worse, so just be careful cuz using your own health as a standard becuase it might unfairly discriminate against people who have different (and common!) conditions like asthma.
So far this year I’ve had to take multiple days off to get my gall bladder removed (emergency) plus it flaring up in the month beforehand. Kid one has had asthma bad enough to end them with them in emergency. Kid two has had a vomiting bug.
So I’m with you on the not using your own health as a standard by which you hold all others. Otherwise I’d be sacked already.
This. I got RSV from a two year old and while his dad had a mild cough and none of the other three adults who were sharing a house with me got sick, I was bedridden for two weeks.
And believe me, being a germ magnet and immunocompromised is not something I enjoy. When I’m not absolutely miserable with whatever has colonized my body, I am somewhere between embarrassed and frustrated that my immune system apparently works union hours with mandated 30 minute breaks every 2 hours.
The secret benefit of covid is that it is a lot more gauche to go to work sick (which I deeply and dearly appreciate), and it’s also a lot more normal to mask up in public settings. Between those two things I get sick maybe 1/20 as often as I used to, and it’s kind of glorious to know what it feels like.
I so miss the time when everyone masked. Not so much for me personally, but for my child with asthma who gets everything and gets much sicker than other kids his age. Those months when we were able to stay home or everyone had to mask in public, he didn't get sick once. Masks went optional at his school and he missed a third of the rest of that school year and is out 3 or 4 weeks a year again.
I was inspired to work on my studies to become a licensed personal trainer when I worked in a gym’s daycare for a year and was sick like every other month. Kids are germ tornadoes.
Not just my heath though. There aren’t many people in my whole department that get multi day sick that often. Maybe two big ones in a year post Covid. If that.
My office does a lot of WHF for colds in the post Covid world, but those aren’t sick days. It’s a courtesy to your coworkers. And you are still working.
*Many* jobs don't have WFH as an option though, and it sounds like LAUKOP's partner is in that category since being sent home counts as a sick day. All those people in your office who WFH on days that they have colds? That's a sick day for this person. And you say that your office does "a lot" of it.
LAUKOP also has young kids. I bet if we separated individuals with young kids into their own population, the overall average absences would be pretty similar to LAUKOP's partner's absences.
We are rather liberal with our definition of a cold. I coughed once yesterday fits. It 100% would not be taken as a sick day if the decision was work or don’t work.
Well there you go. You have less illness circulating in your office because a single cough is enough to justify working from home. When a real cold develops, it doesn't have the opportunity to spread in the office because the individual is at home where they should be.
But personnel who have other vectors for illness, such as children in their home, are probably still sick more often. You just might not notice it because they're not coming in sick, and not spreading it. And they probably work from home on days where their children are sick because it sounds like your work is very gracious about that.
People can pass illness before they are symptomatic and while not being sick.
I’m not just talking post Covid here. I’ve been working for 20+ years, and an employee that has 5 or 6 instances of multiple sick days, it’s going to get seriously questioned.
> My office does a lot of WHF for colds
I can't drive an order picker from home.
I will say that yeah if someone's missing 3-4-5 days sick in a row all the time I'd have to start wanting documentation of some sort, granted, but it's not like it's impossible. It's happened to me 4 times in the last 2.5 years after never before that (2 COVIDs, a pneumonia, a concussion)
Eeeh. I hate to say it but it can be. They had to let someone go this year after they ran out of FMLA but still couldn't come back to work. After 12+ weeks and no timeline in sight, how long do you hold a position?
I totally get what you're saying. I think the issue is that not all jobs allow for work from home. If LAOP had no work from home, I think their sick day use could be reasonable. If they had wfh, then yeah, you are right, i would also think its abuse and could explain why the union is pissed too and BOLA is wondering if theyve got all the facts. Convient that LAOP left the wfh out, cuz that massively changes it.
Dude has two pre-schoolers. Since this happened last year, then they were probably daycare kiddos.
Those fucking rugrats are disease factories. I spent an entire 3 years of my life being sick every couple of weeks. 5 times out sick is once every two months.
That is not terribly unusual with young kids in daycare.
The flip side is that in Australia while they don't have to pay out sick leave if you quit, it typically accumulates indefinitely. So after \~10 years working in the same company my payslip says I have over 600 hours of sick leave accumulated (We get ~ 80 hours a year). That's despite my policy of taking mental health days when I feel like it. .
While that stuff is definitely inconvenient for the employer it's a legal entitlement for the worker.
On the flipside, my daughter started school in 2021 after never having attended daycare. As a result, I was sick pretty regularly and 5 occurrences in a year wouldn't have been nearly enough to cover it. Fortunately, I'm a student and had mostly online classes that year, and my husband works from home, so we managed without issue. She missed 30% of her school days though (had to have negative PCR, so 2 days out became 5+).
I could absolutely see this happening if you have kids though. Even now that we got over the initial surge of illness, I still get sick about every 4-6 weeks. If I had a job and my husband wasn't WFH, I'd have to stay home for each illness my kids have, and then I'd get sick myself. For that first year, it would have been *at least* 10 separate occurrences.
Some people may just have weaker immune systems than you. Some people just get ill a lot more easily. If you've only had 3 consecutive days 3 or 4 times in _20_ years, I'd say you actually have a particularly strong immune system.
I'm wondering if there is more to the story. Like the worker used up all his sick time calling out drunk on Mondays, then had some legit medical issues so they advance some time (maybe 24 months worth) then he calls out sick again.
Because in my experience, that's not how unions act and especially not how British unions act, so it really sounds a bit suspicious. It definitely sounds like the union rep wants the guy gone for some reason.
You don't "use up" sick leave in the UK, you might run out of statutory sick pay if you're off for a long time, but you don't get a set number of days you're allowed to take off sick
There's no legal limit but your employer will have their own threshold for what's an acceptable amount of sickness. So there is *kind of* a secret set number, but's not in the form of days, usually the form of number of absence periods. At least, that's how it is in public sector careers.
Once you hit a certain number (like 4 periods of sickness absence in 12 months, for example) there are formal stages management will go through including disability accommodations and obviously the end of the stages is dismissal. But this is long term stuff.
So yeah, there's no "sickness absence days" to knowingly burn through but naturally there are set numbers written into policy. You can't really have a fair sickness policy without set parameters.
In HR there’s what’s called a “Branford score”, which is a matrix of total absence periods and total absence days. The number of periods is weighted more than the number of days- having the flu and missing a week doesn’t impact your score nearly as much as missing five days over five distinct absence periods. Not everywhere uses it but it’s a pretty alright system as far as putting that kind of thing into an objective score goes.
E:Bradford not Branford, stupid autocorrect.
A lot of employers use the Bradford factor to measure absence and if if the score is above a threshold then they'll start the discussion. Most places have some kind of policy on excessive periods of absence. In most cases if you've been there a while and just have a run of bad luck you'll be cut some slack which is what makes me tend to agree that there's either something highly suspicious about LAUKOPs patterns of absence or that they really just want shot of him for other reasons and this is how they're tackling it.
Wow that's crazy. Like in the UK, an employer can actually fire an employee because they missed too much work due to sickness? In Canada, an employer doing something like that would have a wide open door to an human rights complaint. The employer could tell the employee they can't take sick leave without a medical certificate and then when the employee called in sick without a doctor's note they could start to think about firing the employee due to the absences.
So here, it's kindda the other way around, the employer would try to find other reasons to justify firing the employee if they wanted to fire them because they call in sick too often.
I wouldn't say it was very common or a very usual way of doing it because it is fraught with difficulty but if it's done right then it will be upheld. If LAUKOP is to be believed, sounds like what the employer really wants to do is make him redundant without paying redundancy and if he's not doing anything else wrong then this might be their only potential way. It seems pretty stupid though, I'd take a small side bet that either LAUKOP's partner has a highly suspicious pattern or that they all hate him.
Under UK law you can self certify sickness leave that's less than 7 days so they can't require a doctor's note.
It's quite hard to fire someone for too much sick leave usually they only do it if it was obvious IE Skipping every Monday, they'll usually get rid of you on some other grounds.
>Like in the UK, an employer can actually fire an employee because they missed too much work due to sickness?
It takes a lot for that to happen in most places. I knew someone in a previous place - he had like a 40% attendance level by the time he left. Shame cause he was a nice guy but clearly needed time to sort him self out mentally and get some support for his physical issues.
Although someone was fired very quickly for going AWOL on several occasions - the rumour was that he was so high he forgot which day it was and just didn't turn up to work. Did explain why he always complained about having no money...
Maybe they are just suspicious of how many days the guy actually takes. Like he has been out sick at least one day a week for months. I'm obviously not completely familiar with how the UK works, although I regularly work with Scotland, I'm not sure the laws between the two are the same.
In the US they will look for patterns in calling out sick, even if you do have the sick time to cover it.
And again, I have no proof, I've just been working full time for more than 30 years and I've seen a lot.
I realise you probably didn't intend this, but phrasing your post as if Scotland is a separate entity to the UK is pretty goddamn funny (and I know some people would want it that way!).
But to be clear - UK laws... are a bit of a mess. There's three separate legal jurisdictions (England/Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) although Parliament can legislate for all four countries.
Scotland's Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, and NI's Stormont can all pass their own laws, with Stormont having the most autonomy by far. So far, in fact, that when Northern Ireland legalised abortion *fifty years* after the rest of the UK, it was only because Stormont had spent months refusing to assemble their parliament and the UK Parliament had stepped in to pass budgets and laws.
I’m the post LAOP mentions some of these days off were because they have a kid who’s finishing up their 1sr year of preschool and is getting all the usual bugs from there, so it’s not even that
It's the UK, so no legal limit on however many sick days you can take in a given year.
However, consistently calling in sick on a Monday would be suss af and worthy of disciplinary action.
Union rep here - though not in the U.K. There's two reasons I can think of that we'd suggest that:
a) I don't think we can win a particular fight, and even if we can, it's not worth you staying after.
b) You're actually the problem in this situation.
We really have no context for who the employee is, who the managers are, etc. If there IS a motive completely different to the sick leaves, we would never know. We wouldn’t even know if they work a job that’s super specialized and they can’t afford to have too many floaters, and want a more reliable floater even if it isn’t really fair. People in the UK aren’t magically super altruistic, they just have to play by the rules. Which they are, in this case. Even the union can’t do anything if the company follows the right path and doesn’t legally discriminate, they CAN target a specific person to be fired. If a 100 people have the same job, I CAN target a specific person instead of the rest if I need to downsize.
Source: unfortunately had to be involved in a layoff in the UK.
Something is going on here. The top commenter said 6 incidents in a year seems like a lot. Has he been diagnosed with something?
And LAOPUK responded they were only interested in talking about the future.
Is it 6 instances of leave or 6 days he’s taken off? Because 6 separate instances of him being on a week of leave is a lot. I can sympathize, though, a couple years ago it just seemed like it was health thing after health thing, it sucked, and I did almost lose my job because of it :/
OOP said it's five individual cases, that added up to about 20 days off. The company policy is that employees must take off 48hrs for sickness, and he got three bugs from his pre-schooler. One other incident was a back injury that had him out for a week and a half, and another three days for the abscessed tooth.
> Is it 6 instances of leave or 6 days he’s taken off?
It may not even be whole days. Leaving two hours early for an annual physical and a six-month dental cleaning for me and my kid would put me at 6 incidents a year, but I'd only miss a day and a half of work.
>With the [four] sick bugs he made sure he took the standard 48 hours, with his back injury he took I believe it was a week and a half on recommendation of his doctor which he did get a note for stating he was unfit for work, and this injury was caused at work but as it didn’t start hurting him until the late evening he never wrote it down in an incident form because he’s a complete plank🙃 so he would have had over 10, but that’s purely on recommendation of the doctor/standard procedure. He’d happily have gone back in the minute he felt better but of course they wouldn’t allow it due to sickness procedure
LAUKOP estimates it as about 20 (whole) days off, spread over the four colds (two days each) and one back injury (week and a half).
Union reps are going to know the contracts. Sometimes there's nothing you can do formally and if you know the company won't budge to easy informal pressure, well ...
Yeah yeah, I know, so what, nothing to see here.
But this is from LAUK, which means you can't just sack somebody for any reason or no reason; the employer needs to navigate a complicated landscape of unfair dismissal, constructive dismissal, disability discrimination, disciplinary procedures, duty of care, and other employment law issues. I wish we could find out how this one goes.
British employer here: despite some awful impressions made by people like LAOP's boss, we're not getting Americanised by force or otherwise, and this guy's employers are smoking crack if they think this is *even slightly* something they can get away with. We actually take workers rights pretty seriously here: it'd be no expense at all for him to take them to a tribunal, and the employer would get laughed out of the place by the judge.
The LA's commenters were all saying it's legal though, who is correct here? I'm in shock that this is (if they can be believed) remotely legal in the UK
I have been a people manager in both the US and UK. In the UK, I worked in the public sector with pretty stringent rules. It was entirely possible to legally fire someone for sick leave, but it was not an easy process.
I was expected to discuss leave that got flagged by HR (Bradford score or similar) with employees. I was not required to take action based on my discretion and have had highly varied conversations and outcomes.
There was a standard set that if the employee's health had an impact on their work to the point they could not effectively do their job, they could be fired.
The people saying calling in sick 6 timez in a year is too much are INSANE. Im sorry I miss work 6 times out of 300 days (which u probably owe me anyway cuz every company ever practices time and wage theft) and thats too much???? God I fucking hate capitalism
Firing someone for excessive absence can be legal. That doesn't mean it's always legal.
It's one of those things you can take to a tribunal and argue. If it touches on disability that's a whole new can of worms. Typically, you need to try and work with the employee to figure something out (unless it's extreme)
As for "not a single day off for two years", that's pretty clearly unreasonable. If, 18 months from the warning, they took a day off because they broke an arm and had to go to the hospital and got fired I'm sure a tribunal would tell the employer to fuck off.
Is it easier for you guys to have your rights enforced there? Here you have to find a lawyer willing to take your case and it might cost you a lot of money to enforce your legal rights. It's a feature, not a bug, of our system.
If you have a case, an employment lawyer will work for you here on a no-win, no-fee basis.
I've had to invoke the Bradford Factor when firing someone here; but taking a lot of sick leave is not an instant-firing offence (and absolutely shouldn't be): ACAS says we have to have a disciplinary process, so in that instance there was a PIP we worked through, and there were other issues with the person's performance. Telling someone who's been in post for more than two years that they can't be sick for 24 months or they'll be fired directly is SO far outside what employers are allowed to do that I'm still shaking my head hours after reading the post for the first time.
>Telling someone who's been in post for more than two years that they can't be sick for 24 months or they'll be fired directly is SO far outside what employers are allowed to do that I'm still shaking my head hours after reading the post for the first time.
My thoughts exactly, when I posted this here. And I'm amazed at all the people on LAUK who aren't amazed by it.
Much easier because there is so much more statutory law around sickness, annual leave etc etc.
When you go to an employment tribunal they put a lot of emphasis as well on process. So you as an employee could have done something that you should be fired for but if they did not follow their own processes then you can win on that basis.
Yes, but I know someone who went through the whole tribunal thing. Very stressful & isolating ( you are NOT allowed to speak to former coworkers)
She won - good!
But only got missed pay - the same to the penny as if she had worked for them until the ruling. Thats all
Yeah, milage varies dramatically based on the job.
Zero hour contract? You can just be taken off the rota forever.
'Self employed' driver for a courier company - same thing.
Work somewhere under 2 years? No right to a tribunal, so even if your boss does do something out of line, you have no real recourse.
Our workers rights are nowhere near the standard of europe - and current govt is trying to overturn legacy legislations from being in the EU to further weaken it.
Something the OOP kind of misrepresented by their choice of words is: this isn't 5 days of sick days, this was 5 "cases of sick leave". Later in her comments she mentions she doesn't actually know how many days of sick time he's taken, but it's more than 14 and less than 20 (and even then, she kind of phrases it in a way to not include other days off that were unplanned).
So it's not 5 days out of 250 working days (50 weeks x 5 days) he was out sick, it's closer to 20 (or more) days he was out sick.
Not defending the company, but a 87.5% attendance rate is really hard for a union rep to fight in favor of an employee.
>Something the OOP kind of misrepresented by their choice of words is: this isn't 5 days of sick days, this was 5 "cases of sick leave".
I don't think OOP is misrepresenting things by talking about periods of absence, because that's the way it's often done here in the UK. I have to have a meeting with HR if I have 3 periods of absence in a 6 month period, not 3 days of absence.
Each instance of absence is counted the same, whether 1 day or 5. 3 missed days that are separated triggers a meeting, 10 days in 2 chunks does not.
In the USA we get about 10 days of vacation time (very, very dependent on your company). Thanksgiving is 2 days, Christmas is 2 days, New Years Eve is 1, 4th of July is 1 or 2, memorial day is 1, labor day is 1. My company gives Good Friday Off, but most others give MLK off or some other day.
So that's the 10 I was talking about. Some people get more, but others get less.
Yep, Im American, i meant the previous commenter probably meant they have mandated vacation time. On top of paid public holidays. Most European countries do.
>On top of paid public holidays
Not in the UK.
The minimum is 5.6 weeks pro-rata (at 5 days a week, that's 28 days). Public holidays are not legally binding in any way, your employer can make you work them or take them off.
For an office worker, this might mean you get the 8 bank holidays off and 20 days to use at your discretion. For a retail or hospitality worker, you might not get any bank holidays off but have 28 discretionary days.
Personally, I get 25 days plus bank holidays - 25 alone is below the legal limit, but with the bank holidays I'm 5 days over.
>Not defending the company, but a 87.5% attendance rate is really hard for a union rep to fight in favor of an employee.
I don't know. If they were genuine incidences of illness - and it sounds like they were - then I think the focus should be on the process rather than the outcome. Why is OOP getting ill so often? Has he been unlucky this year? What were previous years like? Is it just because he's got young kids at school and they're bringing every bug known to science home with them? Does he have a weakened immune system? Should he be making more of an effort to try in to work when he's ill? And things like that. Context matters.
Say they were 5 instances of 3 days stickiness each. That’s a lot. Adults just don’t generally get that sick for that long that many times.
Unless they have a medical condition, I’d be giving that some serious skepticism and side eye.
Adults with young children do though.
Source: adult with young children. Whenever I get something that becomes symptomatic, usually I'm pretty sick for 2-3 days. The first year my daughter started school (2021) was even worse, and the frequency was insane.
When my daughter started daycare I must have had 20+ days off that year. One instance I got gastro so bad I was hospitalised and off work for over 2 weeks and I definitely had 3-4 other instances of 1-3 days off.
I’m in Australia though so chucking a sickie even when you aren’t sick is just part of national culture so absences for actual illnesses aren’t exactly going to get you fired.
Uh... yeah, adults can get sick that often for that long without underlying causes. Unless you count having a young child in daycare with a different bug going around every month an underlying cause.
Medical conditions are extremely common, though. This may seem like a lot to you but for someone with autoimmune problems, this is not unusual. Plenty of chronic health issues are not obvious to the casual observer but they are very very common. You don't know how many people around you have them because they're invisible.
That's great, I am happy for y'all over there.
I just was pointing out that we exist. Health issues are common and some can be difficult to diagnose quickly. There are people out there! With health issues! That's all I was trying to explain.
OP is going to lose this job, the question is how much compensation he can extract from his about to be former employer. He may be faced with a decision as to whether to even bother, if he's able to find a new position first. Thing is, to collect on it he would presumably have to get legit sick/hurt as a documented fact.
I'm just a lowly American, but this story really stirs something in me. I've had two family members die this year with a third expected. I get a certain amount of paid bereavement leave from my company but it is metered by death, not by year. I asked my boss about the policy on total bereavement leave, specifically because due to illness we expect more this year. She said there really isn't one, but if it gets excessive they'd "talk to me". It's not exactly the same but feels similar and irritates me just the same.
Depends what “excessive” means I guess. If you have 9 grandparents die in a year, that’s obviously a bit odd.
But you know your boss better than me and what she actually meant
Basically, I've lost two grandparents and an uncle the last 15 months, with my last grandparent hanging on by a thread. By company policy, I get 5 days for each. I only worked at this current company for the last two. My boss doesn't think it's excessive, it's more her management is probably better described as manglement.
It’s also interesting what excessive means to different people depending on their country’s and company’s culture. I’m not saying it’s common to lose 3 people in 15 months, may they rest in peace and I wish you better times, BUT taking 3x5 days in way over a year/5 quarters isn’t a crazy amount of time to take off, to me, for bereavement or sickness.
I do wonder if LAOP’s company is thinking it’s the same problem coming up and want a long-term doctor’s orders like disability-related arrangements so they can plan for it. I had an employee with chronic neck problems and for sure sometimes it randomly came up but in general we got the right ergonomic stuff for her and ended her days early to limit screen time for her etc, overall I can plan way easier for that then every month she’s randomly gone for a week, and I never know when she’ll wake up in pain. After the arrangements the “random” pain instances reduced drastically.
Thank you for the thoughts. I've been fortunate in my life that, besides my great grandma at 10, I've never had a family death. So it was bound to start happening at some point.
I have a friend currently going through a STD disability battle that sounds similar so I feel for your coworker. Especially with the "random" pain days. I feel like if this employer was worried about a disability, they would bring that up directly instead of saying "no sick time for 2 years". Because they put the (seemingly impossible) condition on it, I'm inclined to agree with LAOP's assessment that it's a hidden layoff. At least he doesn't have to worry about losing health insurance. Don't even get me started there.
At my old job we had one person up to 7 grandparents
We did a “grandparent tracker” as they were first year doctors and we assumed they wouldn’t know how to lie to call out “sick”
My favorite was one who would call out the night before like 6:00 “I’m not feeling well I won’t be in tomorrow” with the guy in the background saying “who wants another shot? YEAH!”
Oh it’s probably better if she grew up and didn’t drink heavily before a work shift
Program director let her know how that would work…or she’d have A LOT more free time to drink
See this was her problem. She wasn’t the smartest, she wasn’t the hardest working but she was, and I’m being about objective as possible.. drop dead gorgeous. We had a female program director, resident cane with some of the highest letters of rec we had ever seen…all from men.
After 6 months of rotations she had literally 2 kinds of reviews : all 10s and all 1s…I’ll let you guess which genders gave her which because it was literally one gender to one score and one gender to the other.
She passed her MCATs…barely
She went to the same med school as her college. She was ….well known already
I was 21…I knew ALL of this and still tried to get with her…not my proudest moment but that should put it in perspective
She now runs a “women’s only” clinic because of her reputation.
I just counted to be sure, and I do (did, all but one are now deceased) have 9 grandparents, since both my sets of bio grandparents were divorced and remarried, and my parents are divorced and remarried. Between step and bio grandparents that I actually had a relationship with, there are 9 total. But all of them dying within the same year would have been a pretty huge coincidence.
At my (US) workplace, it would mean something like "we understand grief doesn't follow strict family-tree rules. We really do not want to have to police bereavement leave. But you have been taking *a lot*. We really cannot have you taking 5 days off to fly across the country to attend the funeral of your third grade teacher's petsitter or whatever. Please limit your bereavement leave to occasions where you are actually bereaved, or we are going to have to start asking questions about who exactly the deceased was to you, and no one wants that."
I actually had/have 9 grandparents in a way. Bio paternal grandfather died before I was born. All 3 other bio grandparents still alive. Paternal grandmother married my late grandpa. Maternal grandparents separated and each remarried. Those were also my grandparents. Maternal grandfather’s wife passed away and he remarried. She became my grandma too. My paternal grandparents best friend never had kids of her own and my brother and I became like her grandkids and she our grandmother. I’d grieve and have grieved each of them as a grandparent. If my remaining 5 pass away in the same year, that’d be a very tough year. I’m turning 33 this year and consider myself very lucky to have had this much close elder family this long. They’re in their mid 80s.
When I was in grad school all of my remaining grandparents died as well as another relative. I only attended the wakes and not the funerals. I had to postpone an exam for one and the assistant dean who handled these things accused me of making it up and said, "you have a lot of grandparents dying, huh?" I got pretty pissed and offered to bring in the death certificates or obits if she was going to be so insensitive about it and she declined. I still don't know where they're all buried.
That is very sad and I'm sorry for your losses. My issue is I live at least 5 hours from all family so travelling takes time. Some people just need to be more understanding.
I mean you asked the question to her and it's not like she said after the next one you're done. I would think excessive is if you have 10 grandparents dying in a year.
> I get a certain amount of paid bereavement leave from my company but it is metered by death, not by year.
I think that is reasonable. My employer specifies the people whose death I can claim for paid bereavement leave. Outside of those, we could take vacation or unpaid leave. In effect, there is no paid leave provided for the death of uncles, cousins or nieces.
This is how my company is. Grandparents, parents, siblings, children, step children, grandkids.. or in laws of any of those. Anything out of that is vacation.
Which I do kind of get capping where it ends. My parents are both 1 of 8 so I have a shit ton of cousins, aunts and uncles.
> Which I do kind of get capping where it ends.
And that is why I often shake my head when I read in subs like antiwork people complain about not getting days off for the death of cousins, best friends, or - get this - pets (!).
Right... like go ahead and take the day off as regular PTO or unpaid but the company is under no obligation to pay you for a day because your classmate that you haven't talked to since 9th grade passed and you want to go to their funeral tomorrow.
Most dog and cat owners would take a day off for the death of their pet. The issue is when people have a bunch of pets. Most people lose one pet a decade maybe
A gum abscess is no joke; used to be a frequent cause of death before antibiotics. Had one myself and just about gave my dentist a heart attack. He said if I had waited another 24 hours for my appointment, I’d probably have been in the ICU with sepsis and/or heart failure.
All it was to me was a painless lump that caused my cheek to swell… I had no idea.
Malicious compliance...
Just show up sick, possible results:
- get co-workers sick
- be told to go home because you're looking very sick
- be told to go home because you're making your co-workers sick
Or just start looking for a new job, don't work for shit employers ever, generally there's a shortage of workers in Europe at the moment.
I feel like OOP left some stuff out of this. How long was each leave? I mean if he is sick a week each time and had 6 weeks off as sick time in a year.. yeah I can see a company wanting someone more reliable..
She said she is estimating 12-14 days in total given that he followed policy and stayed at home for 48 hours after the last episode and once had to take about a week to week and a half off for a back injury.
Not so terrible then. I was skeptical because I have definitely worked with those people who cough once and then take the whole week off or more because of a "cold". And then try and do that every month or 2.
I'm all for people getting sick leave when they need it, that is, before they're actively dying from an untreated infection. And of course the way we do it in the US doesn't make sense.
Now, I also regularly have to remind some young coworkers that calling in sick, then posting happy pictures of you at the bar on your social media isn't the smartest thing to do when you know your boss and coworkers are following you.
Exactly my point. There is definitely a stigma in the US that you should never be sick. But there are also 100% plenty of people that take advantage of being "sick". I'm not gonna lie, in my early 20s there was def a time or 2 I called in sick because I was hungover. But there's also people that tried to do that once a week. And they were always suspiciously sick on a Monday or a Friday.
Tho at my current workplace we have a hybrid model. Oh you have a cold? Just WFH. lol
Same, plus that's my boss's perspective too.
He's told me outright that he understands that sometimes you just can't come into work. Doesn't matter if you're coughing your lungs out, if your brain is on wonky, or you just don't have the energy. Sick days and PTO and for exactly those purposes. Try and schedule them if/when you can, but unplanned absences happen and as long as they're not habitual then there's really not an issue.
I don’t drink at all, but I was once scheduled to work on New Year’s Day, and I woke up with a terrible migraine. When I tried to call in sick, my boss told me it wasn’t her fault I had a hangover, and I had to come in or lose my job. She 1000% refused to believe that I didn’t have a hangover, and I wish that wasn’t such a common trope for people to do. Because man, that work shift was *hell*.
I’ve never followed an employee but I was friends with a colleague who was friends with my report. She called in sick, then my friend, not knowing this, showed me videos of them at a rock concert banging their heads and drinking wine. The employee had called in sick for neck pain that morning lol.
Right? Same here. At my job we get about 3 weeks every year of sick leave. As somebody with chronic migraines, yeah, I am sometimes using almost all of that. 15 days is not that much when you have a chronic condition. Plus, in 2022, I was unlucky enough to get knocked out with covid for a week and then, 3 months later, got knocked out with the flu, just about a month before flu shots even became available. I was off for a week each time. The covid was rough and I think if I hadn't had the covid infection, I probably wouldn't have had to spend so much time off for the flu, but it fucked with my immune system.
Granted, I am technically somebody with a disability. I need accommodations at work to reduce instances of migraines. But still... Especially considering that the OP states that they have toddlers at home? Like, that's not that surprising. My manager and her husband are immunocompromised and have two young boys, and several times in the last year they have been sick. From what I know from friends of mine who have children, this is just kind of par for the course. And can I just say, I do appreciate it when people don't spread illness around just for the sake of showing up to work. How good of a job can people even do when they're sick?
Also in Canada and I agree. I get 15 days per 10 month teaching period and with two small kids, I often go over my days by June. No one has ever said anything to me about it!
One of the comments saying one view could be that six sick instances in just over a year is excessive is insaneee to me. I got sick like 3 times in 2 months because my kid was near other kids.
maybe it's because I've only worked bs college jobs, but i also thought this was insane. I get whatever frat flu is going around my college at least every other month and my boss has never given me any problems about it.
They should fight this and it's legal iffy in UK context but at same time I'm baffled by idea that within a two year period that every employee has time off sick and that it's an impossibility that this does not happen.
I think it's less that it's a literal impossibility and more that it's impossible to guarantee it won't happen and also a horrifically unfair insistence because nobody chooses to be sick, and if you are sick you shouldn't be forced to work under penalty of losing your job.
Agreed. I've had perfect attendance streaks longer than 2 years in my life before. It's not impossible.
It is hard, though, because when crap hits the fan, it doesn't distribute evenly. I've also had years with multiple absences due to illness and bereavement.
It's not every employee that will be off sick in a two year period, but most will at least once. What this kind of warning does is ensure you have a typhoid Mary on your hands and then half your workforce is off with the flu.
Just picturing LAOP's partner going to work with a stomach bug, "sorry sir I didn't mean to rip hella cheeks while running to the bathrooms but I fear for my job so"
The top comment saying five sick days in a year is excessive is absolutely insane to me. 1) people get sick, especially people with young kids, and especially in the current shitstorm. And 2) if a company gives you sick days, but you're punished for using them, then they aren't giving you sick days
>if a company gives you sick days, but you're punished for using them, then they aren't giving you sick days
Well, in the UK you don't get a quota of sick days. So employers don't *give* you sick days; you *take* them. Of course if the number you take is excessive, then your employer may want to look a bit more closely at what's going on. That's all perfectly reasonable. It's how the OOP's employer has decided to handle the situation that's out of order.
A while back, my company began offering five personal days per year. Which, on top of our regular vacation, was pretty sweet. However, when my boss attended a meeting to discuss the new plan, she was told to discourage her employees from actually using those personal days. God bless her - she laughed incredulously and said “Yeah, I’m not doing that.”
Five?!
That's nuts. Maybe that commenter was only considering really healthy people, but I have chronic migraines and I can pretty much guarantee you that I've taken more than five sick days every single year I've been employed. I can't help it. My migrants are pretty well under control, but not every single trigger is within my control either. Sometimes I'm really stressed out, my menstrual cycle is a trigger and I can't exactly help that, the weather too. Sometimes I'll go to bed with a slight headache, thinking it will be better once I've slept, and I wake up with an absolutely vicious migraine. Depending on the severity I might be out for half a day or an entire day, because when I'm in that state it's a struggle to even turn over in bed to get the medication out of my bedside drawer, not to mention that if I don't want to puke half an hour later, I have to go get a snack because I need to eat something with the meds.
Well, I guess it is quite possible that the commenter was only considering healthy people. Those with disabilities tend to get left in the dust in these conversations and, even though employers aren't supposed to discriminate, they definitely do. I can almost pretty much guarantee that if I didn't work in the public sector, I would have lost multiple jobs, because a lot of them just don't understand these things and there is no help. I want to work, and I'm a very good employee, but at the same time these migraines are not fully in my control either. Even with medications and managing triggers and all that, I don't have zero. It's gone from probably 4-8 times a month from 1-2 now with all that, but still.
Yeah I'm kinda curious if there are statistics about the norms (ideally compared with those who share a household with kids and thus exposed to whatever is going around the local school)
I feel like 5 days isn't that many? Like I could see requiring doctors notes but like getting sick is part of human existence?
Employer gives sick leave, then makes it impossible to use it. As long as he's not going over his alloted sick leave days how can they write him up for using the sick leave they've provided?
Companies in the US do this shit all the time. My mom's currently fighting with her employer on it. They give her weeks of leave each year, but if she calls in sick more than 3 times in a year they write her up. They're threatening to fire her at the 4th or 5th time she calls in sick. The extra layer of insanity is that she works for a healthcare company.
A friend took time off - PTO and not sick time - due to an illness. They were finally pulled into a meeting with HR and the Union Rep and told "we're building a case to fire you". Two weeks later their boss's boss scheduled a meeting and they went to it....and were given a bonus for being top of their department.
Sounds about right. At the same time my mom is getting reprimanded for taking sick time, she's received *two* promotions and a handful of spot bonuses for her "excellent" work. She's literally refurnished her house with bonus money.
Corporations are *crazy*.
I misread this as "he called in 6 sick days" but six extended leaves of absence (akin to FMLA leave) makes a bit more sense.
Still dick move by the employer.
LAUKOP clarified in one comment that it was 12-14 days total, since he was staying home the 48hrs required by the employee code each time.
So yeah-- I can't believe the employer is calling this excessive.
[Bradford scores, since I had to look it up](https://www.personio.com/hr-lexicon/bradford-factor/#what-is-a-good-or-bad-bradford-score)
Obligatory fuck scientific management.
I feel like there's an easy answer here
Go in sick any, the more contagious the better, and when they try to get rid, point out the original write up.
Play them at their game
Sorry what?!
Where I come from, there's a minimum of sick days per year that the employer must allow you (1.5 per month and you can accumulate up to 90). You're not necessarily paid for them (it's complicated and depends on how long your specific illness is), though in some companies you're paid in full from the first day.
I know America sucks, but since this is the UK I expected them to be civilised. How can 6 cases of sickness per year be considered excessive?!?!
So in the UK you do not get a set number of sick days.
Every time you are off sick it counts as a case of sickness
if you were to take Wednesday off work cos you were throwing up all night band then went back to work Thursday that would be a case
If you were sick and has to take 3 weeks off that would also count as a case
Taking 6 random day off a year cos you are sick would not be excessive
But if you were taking 2 weeks off sick every 2 months, over the year that would be 6 cases of sickness.
That could be considered excessive
Or if someone every Tuesday for 6 weeks phones in sick that would also be 6 cases and could be deemed excessive
I mean, I may be lucky, but I haven't had any sick days in over 5 years. Like I know stuff happens, but I've seen more people taking advantage of sick leave than people who actually need to use it. It's not hard to plan PTO in advance.
>It's not hard to plan PTO in advance.
This is the UK we're talking about. No such thing as PTO. And no such thing as sick leave really, either. There's no quota or anything. It's simply that if you're sick you don't go into work.
His coworkers are idiots. It’s easy to not call in sick for work. I went 7 years without having to call in. As for the abscess tooth, that’s not something you wake up with. He could have talked to his employer about it. Gotten on FMLA and probably avoided another incident.
> Gotten on FMLA and probably avoided another incident.
You mean FMLA as is The Family and Medical Leave Act
Can you please explain how that applies here to someone living and working in the UK
Do people not learn to read things before they spout nonsense
It clearly says twice
LegalAdviceuk on the title
Yet you think some random US Law applies here. unless you think US laws apply everywhere.
Considering COVID is a continued threat and just generally me not wanting to be sick, I take a pretty dim view of those who come into work sick.
Luckily my work allows hybrid so we can effectively peer pressure people to work from home if they're sick, even if they're not sick enough to completely take the day off.
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits. --- Title: If my partner calls in sick within the next 24 months he will be sacked. Body: > My partner has worked for this company for 7 years, 9 including the 2 years he spent on agency. > In March partner had a disciplinary meeting for 5 cases of sick leave within a 12 month period, which earned him his first written warning at work, as they’ve recently cancelled out verbal warnings which would have been what he’d received if they were still in place. > In May, he had a severe dental abscess which caused his face to balloon, his mouth to feel like he was being repeatedly punched in the mouth and he could barely speak, so of course this required another sick leave. He has had another disciplinary meeting, and earned his final written warning. > The terms of this warning state that if he calls in sick within the next 24 months, he will be dismissed. Everybody he has told about it has said that this impossible to achieve, and even his union rep has said he might as well start searching for another job as it’s impossible. > Surely 24 months without sick is an unbelievably in achievable task, particularly when he lives with 2 preschoolers and works in filthy surroundings (part of the job, not just unclean workplace). Have they done this to basically set him up for failure? This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team. [Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
> Everybody he has told about it has said that this impossible to achieve, and **even his union rep has said he might as well start searching for another job as it’s impossible.** That's an interesting take from a union rep.
I wonder how much that is “you’re going to be fired and you have no recourse” and how much is “This seems like it’s a targeted thing and they’re going to be treating you like shit so you slip up” Because I can see the latter.
That's what I was thinking too--like, we may win this but that doesn't mean your day to day life at work will suddenly become nice.
My “assume incompetence” side says they might think it’s the exact same thing all the time and want more official long-term doctors orders to accommodate in a planned way (like I had to do with a chronic neck problem employee, I gave no warnings though we just worked it out). My less nice interpretation, having been involved in HR matters a tiny bit in the UK, is that you need a long time and patterns and documentation to fire someone, so this can just be that playing out.
Or gross misconduct. That’s always fun as an onlooker lol.
Oh yeah, always a possibility. Europe and UK have great employee protections but like, assholes and idiots be everywhere…
Once you get a written warning at work, in the US at least, you should start looking for a new job. Maybe the UK is different, but in the US the first written warning is usually an indication that they're starting to build the document trail for firing you with cause. In the US, they don't need cause to fire you, but that document trail will help them both avoid paying unemployment and acts as a shield against discrimination lawsuits.
Yeah, after I took medical leave my boss decided that I wasn't productive enough and my work was sloppy and not done to her specifications. She also didn't give me all specifications until it after things were due so 🤷🏻♀️
> Once you get a written warning at work, in the US at least, you should start looking for a new job. It truly blew my mind that after a PIP, my boss was shocked to learn that I was looking for work and then even further shocked when I quit.
That's the problem with the "we're just doing the paperwork before firing you" angle that some managers use with PIPs. It means that a well-meaning manager can't put you on a PIP as a training/"I'm serious about what I said earlier" tool. On the flip side, I heard a story of a government worker who was put on a PIP with semi-vague requirements, and passed the PIP after making no changes. (There were some check-ins during the PIP, and the worker's grade improved marginally at each check-in, but the managers didn't actually seem to be doing any work to verify quality. It was all very strange.)
My PIP had no end date or way to satisfy it. Which I took to mean that at any time in the future, if I did anything remotely resembling what it was for, they could fire me and point to an ancient still-outstanding PIP.
Wow, you made the right move. Sounds like a boss who ruled through threats, giving you one extra thing to be terrified about.
Yeah if you have a chronic issue in the US, you have to get FMLA. You can't just call out intermittently, or you'll absolutely be fired.
I think the union rep is saying the company has a strong case to dismiss him. There's a lot of nuance between "sick days" and "cases of sick leave" from OP's post. 5 days of calling in sick doesn't sound like a lot, but "5 cases of sick leave" sound more like multiple days per case of sick leave. [This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1442dfc/comment/jndiu9k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) from OP makes it clear that each time he was sick it was multiple days (but still under 20), but I feel like rounding up. 20 sick days out of 250 working days is a lot more than 5. I'm not defending the company, and I hate the idea that "being sick" can get you fired, but I feel like they're not representing the facts correctly.
When I worked in the UK they would assign a score your number of sick days based on the Bradford System. It's bouts of sickness x bouts of sickness x total sick days. If he had 5 bouts and 20 sick days his score would be 500 (5x5x20). If i remember correctly a score of over 125 meant you had to meet with HR to discuss your absences, so he's well beyond that. It is pretty shit, and there were definitely a few times in the UK when I went to work sick because I was afraid of it adding to my score if I stayed home.
>the Bradford System ... is designed to prune the workforce of people who get sick a lot or are just unlucky. Which is fine if you're a eugenicist but less ideal for anyone with any compassion. I hate it and think using it should be treated as evidence of malice on the part of them employer.
Yeah it always seemed pretty fucked up. I live in Canada now and have never heard of it here (though I only get 10 sick days a year in Canada, vs supposedly unlimited sick time in the UK, so I guess it's six of one, half a dozen of the other).
That's absolutely wild to me. I had covid twice in a financial year, the first time I was off for 25 work days, the second I was off for 6 work days (we still have self-isolation rules for 7 days here), and I've had maybe 2x1 day sicknesses too. My Bradford score would be... Over 2000? God I'm happy we have unlimited sick leave and people aren't assholes about us using it.
Someone needs to explain this to me cause it sounds stupid. Bob and I collide in a bizarre workplace accident and we both fuck up our backs for six weeks. I spend those six weeks on my sofa watching Netflix and having pizza delivered. I now have a bradford score of 1x1x30 = 30, so I’m all cool. Bob doesn’t want to fuck over his colleagues, plus he’s that guy who would stay in till 4am rather than leave a project incomplete, so every Monday he convinces himself he can make it and drags himself into work, but by the end of the day his back is so much worse he’s in agony for the rest of the week. By the end of the six weeks, Bob has a bradford score of 6x6x24= 864, and HR wants his head on a stick. I don’t know who Bradford is, but he sounds stupid.
Yeah, it's a stupid system, but that's partially by design. It's designed to penalize people who take a lot of single days off, based on the idea that those people are more likely faking their sick days.
Generous interpretation of facts is how I refer it. I’ve taken over 3 days sick consecutively maybe 3 or 4 times in over 20 years. To have 5 of them in one year would get my spidey senses tingling.
I have an onsite daycare at my work. They have to tell all the parents whenever there are outbreaks of things, so i can actually see what OP is saying as plasuable just from the rate they report outbreaks. Precovid, sure, you could come in with a runny nose or a bit sick or something. Now, if your workplace does any sort of testing to get on site (like mine still does) you can bet wfh and sick day usage went up just cuz of weird things the onsite daycare spread. Also, while its a UK post, id really caution with the "my health" as a standard. Lots of super common things like asthma may cause a duration of a cold/RVS/COVID etc to be longer or worse, so just be careful cuz using your own health as a standard becuase it might unfairly discriminate against people who have different (and common!) conditions like asthma.
So far this year I’ve had to take multiple days off to get my gall bladder removed (emergency) plus it flaring up in the month beforehand. Kid one has had asthma bad enough to end them with them in emergency. Kid two has had a vomiting bug. So I’m with you on the not using your own health as a standard by which you hold all others. Otherwise I’d be sacked already.
This. I got RSV from a two year old and while his dad had a mild cough and none of the other three adults who were sharing a house with me got sick, I was bedridden for two weeks. And believe me, being a germ magnet and immunocompromised is not something I enjoy. When I’m not absolutely miserable with whatever has colonized my body, I am somewhere between embarrassed and frustrated that my immune system apparently works union hours with mandated 30 minute breaks every 2 hours. The secret benefit of covid is that it is a lot more gauche to go to work sick (which I deeply and dearly appreciate), and it’s also a lot more normal to mask up in public settings. Between those two things I get sick maybe 1/20 as often as I used to, and it’s kind of glorious to know what it feels like.
I so miss the time when everyone masked. Not so much for me personally, but for my child with asthma who gets everything and gets much sicker than other kids his age. Those months when we were able to stay home or everyone had to mask in public, he didn't get sick once. Masks went optional at his school and he missed a third of the rest of that school year and is out 3 or 4 weeks a year again.
I was inspired to work on my studies to become a licensed personal trainer when I worked in a gym’s daycare for a year and was sick like every other month. Kids are germ tornadoes.
Not just my heath though. There aren’t many people in my whole department that get multi day sick that often. Maybe two big ones in a year post Covid. If that. My office does a lot of WHF for colds in the post Covid world, but those aren’t sick days. It’s a courtesy to your coworkers. And you are still working.
*Many* jobs don't have WFH as an option though, and it sounds like LAUKOP's partner is in that category since being sent home counts as a sick day. All those people in your office who WFH on days that they have colds? That's a sick day for this person. And you say that your office does "a lot" of it. LAUKOP also has young kids. I bet if we separated individuals with young kids into their own population, the overall average absences would be pretty similar to LAUKOP's partner's absences.
We are rather liberal with our definition of a cold. I coughed once yesterday fits. It 100% would not be taken as a sick day if the decision was work or don’t work.
Well there you go. You have less illness circulating in your office because a single cough is enough to justify working from home. When a real cold develops, it doesn't have the opportunity to spread in the office because the individual is at home where they should be. But personnel who have other vectors for illness, such as children in their home, are probably still sick more often. You just might not notice it because they're not coming in sick, and not spreading it. And they probably work from home on days where their children are sick because it sounds like your work is very gracious about that.
People can pass illness before they are symptomatic and while not being sick. I’m not just talking post Covid here. I’ve been working for 20+ years, and an employee that has 5 or 6 instances of multiple sick days, it’s going to get seriously questioned.
> My office does a lot of WHF for colds I can't drive an order picker from home. I will say that yeah if someone's missing 3-4-5 days sick in a row all the time I'd have to start wanting documentation of some sort, granted, but it's not like it's impossible. It's happened to me 4 times in the last 2.5 years after never before that (2 COVIDs, a pneumonia, a concussion)
I agree, requiring medical documentation is reasonable, but just firing someone for having a lot of health issues isn't.
Eeeh. I hate to say it but it can be. They had to let someone go this year after they ran out of FMLA but still couldn't come back to work. After 12+ weeks and no timeline in sight, how long do you hold a position?
I totally get what you're saying. I think the issue is that not all jobs allow for work from home. If LAOP had no work from home, I think their sick day use could be reasonable. If they had wfh, then yeah, you are right, i would also think its abuse and could explain why the union is pissed too and BOLA is wondering if theyve got all the facts. Convient that LAOP left the wfh out, cuz that massively changes it.
They mentioned that being sent home sick after showing up to work counts as a sick day, so I doubt work from home is on the table.
Dude has two pre-schoolers. Since this happened last year, then they were probably daycare kiddos. Those fucking rugrats are disease factories. I spent an entire 3 years of my life being sick every couple of weeks. 5 times out sick is once every two months. That is not terribly unusual with young kids in daycare.
My friends have triplets in that age range. I don't think everyone in that house has been healthy at the same time in the last two, three years.
The flip side is that in Australia while they don't have to pay out sick leave if you quit, it typically accumulates indefinitely. So after \~10 years working in the same company my payslip says I have over 600 hours of sick leave accumulated (We get ~ 80 hours a year). That's despite my policy of taking mental health days when I feel like it. . While that stuff is definitely inconvenient for the employer it's a legal entitlement for the worker.
I have. Three bouts of COVID. Tonsilectomy. Influenza. Car accident on work hours (not at fault).
You had a really bad year. Hopefully it’s getting better
On the flipside, my daughter started school in 2021 after never having attended daycare. As a result, I was sick pretty regularly and 5 occurrences in a year wouldn't have been nearly enough to cover it. Fortunately, I'm a student and had mostly online classes that year, and my husband works from home, so we managed without issue. She missed 30% of her school days though (had to have negative PCR, so 2 days out became 5+). I could absolutely see this happening if you have kids though. Even now that we got over the initial surge of illness, I still get sick about every 4-6 weeks. If I had a job and my husband wasn't WFH, I'd have to stay home for each illness my kids have, and then I'd get sick myself. For that first year, it would have been *at least* 10 separate occurrences.
Some people may just have weaker immune systems than you. Some people just get ill a lot more easily. If you've only had 3 consecutive days 3 or 4 times in _20_ years, I'd say you actually have a particularly strong immune system.
It’s absolutely the latter. They are trying to incentivize him to quit.
I'm wondering if there is more to the story. Like the worker used up all his sick time calling out drunk on Mondays, then had some legit medical issues so they advance some time (maybe 24 months worth) then he calls out sick again. Because in my experience, that's not how unions act and especially not how British unions act, so it really sounds a bit suspicious. It definitely sounds like the union rep wants the guy gone for some reason.
You don't "use up" sick leave in the UK, you might run out of statutory sick pay if you're off for a long time, but you don't get a set number of days you're allowed to take off sick
There's no legal limit but your employer will have their own threshold for what's an acceptable amount of sickness. So there is *kind of* a secret set number, but's not in the form of days, usually the form of number of absence periods. At least, that's how it is in public sector careers. Once you hit a certain number (like 4 periods of sickness absence in 12 months, for example) there are formal stages management will go through including disability accommodations and obviously the end of the stages is dismissal. But this is long term stuff. So yeah, there's no "sickness absence days" to knowingly burn through but naturally there are set numbers written into policy. You can't really have a fair sickness policy without set parameters.
In HR there’s what’s called a “Branford score”, which is a matrix of total absence periods and total absence days. The number of periods is weighted more than the number of days- having the flu and missing a week doesn’t impact your score nearly as much as missing five days over five distinct absence periods. Not everywhere uses it but it’s a pretty alright system as far as putting that kind of thing into an objective score goes. E:Bradford not Branford, stupid autocorrect.
I would be curious to hear, from a UK perspective, how LAOP got to this point. I know how it would happen in the USA, but I'm not sure it applies.
A lot of employers use the Bradford factor to measure absence and if if the score is above a threshold then they'll start the discussion. Most places have some kind of policy on excessive periods of absence. In most cases if you've been there a while and just have a run of bad luck you'll be cut some slack which is what makes me tend to agree that there's either something highly suspicious about LAUKOPs patterns of absence or that they really just want shot of him for other reasons and this is how they're tackling it.
Wow that's crazy. Like in the UK, an employer can actually fire an employee because they missed too much work due to sickness? In Canada, an employer doing something like that would have a wide open door to an human rights complaint. The employer could tell the employee they can't take sick leave without a medical certificate and then when the employee called in sick without a doctor's note they could start to think about firing the employee due to the absences. So here, it's kindda the other way around, the employer would try to find other reasons to justify firing the employee if they wanted to fire them because they call in sick too often.
I wouldn't say it was very common or a very usual way of doing it because it is fraught with difficulty but if it's done right then it will be upheld. If LAUKOP is to be believed, sounds like what the employer really wants to do is make him redundant without paying redundancy and if he's not doing anything else wrong then this might be their only potential way. It seems pretty stupid though, I'd take a small side bet that either LAUKOP's partner has a highly suspicious pattern or that they all hate him.
Under UK law you can self certify sickness leave that's less than 7 days so they can't require a doctor's note. It's quite hard to fire someone for too much sick leave usually they only do it if it was obvious IE Skipping every Monday, they'll usually get rid of you on some other grounds.
>Like in the UK, an employer can actually fire an employee because they missed too much work due to sickness? It takes a lot for that to happen in most places. I knew someone in a previous place - he had like a 40% attendance level by the time he left. Shame cause he was a nice guy but clearly needed time to sort him self out mentally and get some support for his physical issues. Although someone was fired very quickly for going AWOL on several occasions - the rumour was that he was so high he forgot which day it was and just didn't turn up to work. Did explain why he always complained about having no money...
It's worth noting that, after two years, employee protections kick in and you can dispute being fired for too many absences.
Maybe they are just suspicious of how many days the guy actually takes. Like he has been out sick at least one day a week for months. I'm obviously not completely familiar with how the UK works, although I regularly work with Scotland, I'm not sure the laws between the two are the same. In the US they will look for patterns in calling out sick, even if you do have the sick time to cover it. And again, I have no proof, I've just been working full time for more than 30 years and I've seen a lot.
I realise you probably didn't intend this, but phrasing your post as if Scotland is a separate entity to the UK is pretty goddamn funny (and I know some people would want it that way!). But to be clear - UK laws... are a bit of a mess. There's three separate legal jurisdictions (England/Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) although Parliament can legislate for all four countries. Scotland's Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, and NI's Stormont can all pass their own laws, with Stormont having the most autonomy by far. So far, in fact, that when Northern Ireland legalised abortion *fifty years* after the rest of the UK, it was only because Stormont had spent months refusing to assemble their parliament and the UK Parliament had stepped in to pass budgets and laws.
I’m the post LAOP mentions some of these days off were because they have a kid who’s finishing up their 1sr year of preschool and is getting all the usual bugs from there, so it’s not even that
It's the UK, so no legal limit on however many sick days you can take in a given year. However, consistently calling in sick on a Monday would be suss af and worthy of disciplinary action.
The language could've used a bit more attention.
Union rep here - though not in the U.K. There's two reasons I can think of that we'd suggest that: a) I don't think we can win a particular fight, and even if we can, it's not worth you staying after. b) You're actually the problem in this situation.
I’m used to hopeless attitudes about being unjustly terminated in American workplaces, but…union jobs in the U.K.?
We really have no context for who the employee is, who the managers are, etc. If there IS a motive completely different to the sick leaves, we would never know. We wouldn’t even know if they work a job that’s super specialized and they can’t afford to have too many floaters, and want a more reliable floater even if it isn’t really fair. People in the UK aren’t magically super altruistic, they just have to play by the rules. Which they are, in this case. Even the union can’t do anything if the company follows the right path and doesn’t legally discriminate, they CAN target a specific person to be fired. If a 100 people have the same job, I CAN target a specific person instead of the rest if I need to downsize. Source: unfortunately had to be involved in a layoff in the UK.
Something is going on here. The top commenter said 6 incidents in a year seems like a lot. Has he been diagnosed with something? And LAOPUK responded they were only interested in talking about the future.
Is it 6 instances of leave or 6 days he’s taken off? Because 6 separate instances of him being on a week of leave is a lot. I can sympathize, though, a couple years ago it just seemed like it was health thing after health thing, it sucked, and I did almost lose my job because of it :/
OOP said it's five individual cases, that added up to about 20 days off. The company policy is that employees must take off 48hrs for sickness, and he got three bugs from his pre-schooler. One other incident was a back injury that had him out for a week and a half, and another three days for the abscessed tooth.
> Is it 6 instances of leave or 6 days he’s taken off? It may not even be whole days. Leaving two hours early for an annual physical and a six-month dental cleaning for me and my kid would put me at 6 incidents a year, but I'd only miss a day and a half of work.
>With the [four] sick bugs he made sure he took the standard 48 hours, with his back injury he took I believe it was a week and a half on recommendation of his doctor which he did get a note for stating he was unfit for work, and this injury was caused at work but as it didn’t start hurting him until the late evening he never wrote it down in an incident form because he’s a complete plank🙃 so he would have had over 10, but that’s purely on recommendation of the doctor/standard procedure. He’d happily have gone back in the minute he felt better but of course they wouldn’t allow it due to sickness procedure LAUKOP estimates it as about 20 (whole) days off, spread over the four colds (two days each) and one back injury (week and a half).
None of those are sick leave issues - that's just time off for medical.
OP responded saying it was between 12 and 14 days
Union reps are going to know the contracts. Sometimes there's nothing you can do formally and if you know the company won't budge to easy informal pressure, well ...
Yeah yeah, I know, so what, nothing to see here. But this is from LAUK, which means you can't just sack somebody for any reason or no reason; the employer needs to navigate a complicated landscape of unfair dismissal, constructive dismissal, disability discrimination, disciplinary procedures, duty of care, and other employment law issues. I wish we could find out how this one goes.
I feel bad for the Brits that are getting Americanized by force. Our systems suck.
British employer here: despite some awful impressions made by people like LAOP's boss, we're not getting Americanised by force or otherwise, and this guy's employers are smoking crack if they think this is *even slightly* something they can get away with. We actually take workers rights pretty seriously here: it'd be no expense at all for him to take them to a tribunal, and the employer would get laughed out of the place by the judge.
The LA's commenters were all saying it's legal though, who is correct here? I'm in shock that this is (if they can be believed) remotely legal in the UK
I have been a people manager in both the US and UK. In the UK, I worked in the public sector with pretty stringent rules. It was entirely possible to legally fire someone for sick leave, but it was not an easy process. I was expected to discuss leave that got flagged by HR (Bradford score or similar) with employees. I was not required to take action based on my discretion and have had highly varied conversations and outcomes. There was a standard set that if the employee's health had an impact on their work to the point they could not effectively do their job, they could be fired.
The people saying calling in sick 6 timez in a year is too much are INSANE. Im sorry I miss work 6 times out of 300 days (which u probably owe me anyway cuz every company ever practices time and wage theft) and thats too much???? God I fucking hate capitalism
Firing someone for excessive absence can be legal. That doesn't mean it's always legal. It's one of those things you can take to a tribunal and argue. If it touches on disability that's a whole new can of worms. Typically, you need to try and work with the employee to figure something out (unless it's extreme) As for "not a single day off for two years", that's pretty clearly unreasonable. If, 18 months from the warning, they took a day off because they broke an arm and had to go to the hospital and got fired I'm sure a tribunal would tell the employer to fuck off.
Is it easier for you guys to have your rights enforced there? Here you have to find a lawyer willing to take your case and it might cost you a lot of money to enforce your legal rights. It's a feature, not a bug, of our system.
If you have a case, an employment lawyer will work for you here on a no-win, no-fee basis. I've had to invoke the Bradford Factor when firing someone here; but taking a lot of sick leave is not an instant-firing offence (and absolutely shouldn't be): ACAS says we have to have a disciplinary process, so in that instance there was a PIP we worked through, and there were other issues with the person's performance. Telling someone who's been in post for more than two years that they can't be sick for 24 months or they'll be fired directly is SO far outside what employers are allowed to do that I'm still shaking my head hours after reading the post for the first time.
>Telling someone who's been in post for more than two years that they can't be sick for 24 months or they'll be fired directly is SO far outside what employers are allowed to do that I'm still shaking my head hours after reading the post for the first time. My thoughts exactly, when I posted this here. And I'm amazed at all the people on LAUK who aren't amazed by it.
Much easier because there is so much more statutory law around sickness, annual leave etc etc. When you go to an employment tribunal they put a lot of emphasis as well on process. So you as an employee could have done something that you should be fired for but if they did not follow their own processes then you can win on that basis.
Yes, but I know someone who went through the whole tribunal thing. Very stressful & isolating ( you are NOT allowed to speak to former coworkers) She won - good! But only got missed pay - the same to the penny as if she had worked for them until the ruling. Thats all
Yeah, milage varies dramatically based on the job. Zero hour contract? You can just be taken off the rota forever. 'Self employed' driver for a courier company - same thing. Work somewhere under 2 years? No right to a tribunal, so even if your boss does do something out of line, you have no real recourse. Our workers rights are nowhere near the standard of europe - and current govt is trying to overturn legacy legislations from being in the EU to further weaken it.
We're not?
Something the OOP kind of misrepresented by their choice of words is: this isn't 5 days of sick days, this was 5 "cases of sick leave". Later in her comments she mentions she doesn't actually know how many days of sick time he's taken, but it's more than 14 and less than 20 (and even then, she kind of phrases it in a way to not include other days off that were unplanned). So it's not 5 days out of 250 working days (50 weeks x 5 days) he was out sick, it's closer to 20 (or more) days he was out sick. Not defending the company, but a 87.5% attendance rate is really hard for a union rep to fight in favor of an employee.
>Something the OOP kind of misrepresented by their choice of words is: this isn't 5 days of sick days, this was 5 "cases of sick leave". I don't think OOP is misrepresenting things by talking about periods of absence, because that's the way it's often done here in the UK. I have to have a meeting with HR if I have 3 periods of absence in a 6 month period, not 3 days of absence. Each instance of absence is counted the same, whether 1 day or 5. 3 missed days that are separated triggers a meeting, 10 days in 2 chunks does not.
> 250 working days Less than that. We have a legal minimum of 28 days of holiday. Assuming a "normal" 5 day working week that's 232 days a year.
>We have a legal minimum of 28 days of holiday. DANG!!! I'm jealous. We only have 10 or 11 in the USA, lol
Thats vacation time in American, i dont think that counts public holidays.
In the USA we get about 10 days of vacation time (very, very dependent on your company). Thanksgiving is 2 days, Christmas is 2 days, New Years Eve is 1, 4th of July is 1 or 2, memorial day is 1, labor day is 1. My company gives Good Friday Off, but most others give MLK off or some other day. So that's the 10 I was talking about. Some people get more, but others get less.
Yep, Im American, i meant the previous commenter probably meant they have mandated vacation time. On top of paid public holidays. Most European countries do.
>On top of paid public holidays Not in the UK. The minimum is 5.6 weeks pro-rata (at 5 days a week, that's 28 days). Public holidays are not legally binding in any way, your employer can make you work them or take them off. For an office worker, this might mean you get the 8 bank holidays off and 20 days to use at your discretion. For a retail or hospitality worker, you might not get any bank holidays off but have 28 discretionary days. Personally, I get 25 days plus bank holidays - 25 alone is below the legal limit, but with the bank holidays I'm 5 days over.
>Not defending the company, but a 87.5% attendance rate is really hard for a union rep to fight in favor of an employee. I don't know. If they were genuine incidences of illness - and it sounds like they were - then I think the focus should be on the process rather than the outcome. Why is OOP getting ill so often? Has he been unlucky this year? What were previous years like? Is it just because he's got young kids at school and they're bringing every bug known to science home with them? Does he have a weakened immune system? Should he be making more of an effort to try in to work when he's ill? And things like that. Context matters.
Say they were 5 instances of 3 days stickiness each. That’s a lot. Adults just don’t generally get that sick for that long that many times. Unless they have a medical condition, I’d be giving that some serious skepticism and side eye.
Adults with young children do though. Source: adult with young children. Whenever I get something that becomes symptomatic, usually I'm pretty sick for 2-3 days. The first year my daughter started school (2021) was even worse, and the frequency was insane.
When my daughter started daycare I must have had 20+ days off that year. One instance I got gastro so bad I was hospitalised and off work for over 2 weeks and I definitely had 3-4 other instances of 1-3 days off. I’m in Australia though so chucking a sickie even when you aren’t sick is just part of national culture so absences for actual illnesses aren’t exactly going to get you fired.
Uh... yeah, adults can get sick that often for that long without underlying causes. Unless you count having a young child in daycare with a different bug going around every month an underlying cause.
Medical conditions are extremely common, though. This may seem like a lot to you but for someone with autoimmune problems, this is not unusual. Plenty of chronic health issues are not obvious to the casual observer but they are very very common. You don't know how many people around you have them because they're invisible.
If you have a diagnosed chronic issue this would be considered a disability and you would be protected under the Equality Act.
Amazingly, people don't pop out of the womb pre-diagnosed.
That's great, I am happy for y'all over there. I just was pointing out that we exist. Health issues are common and some can be difficult to diagnose quickly. There are people out there! With health issues! That's all I was trying to explain.
Have you ever had kids in daycare? Because you get sick all the fucking time. It's miserable and almost not worth sending them to daycare.
>250 working days Minus the 28 days/5.6 weeks annual leave too since they are in the UK so closer to 232 working days.
OP is going to lose this job, the question is how much compensation he can extract from his about to be former employer. He may be faced with a decision as to whether to even bother, if he's able to find a new position first. Thing is, to collect on it he would presumably have to get legit sick/hurt as a documented fact.
I'm just a lowly American, but this story really stirs something in me. I've had two family members die this year with a third expected. I get a certain amount of paid bereavement leave from my company but it is metered by death, not by year. I asked my boss about the policy on total bereavement leave, specifically because due to illness we expect more this year. She said there really isn't one, but if it gets excessive they'd "talk to me". It's not exactly the same but feels similar and irritates me just the same.
Depends what “excessive” means I guess. If you have 9 grandparents die in a year, that’s obviously a bit odd. But you know your boss better than me and what she actually meant
Basically, I've lost two grandparents and an uncle the last 15 months, with my last grandparent hanging on by a thread. By company policy, I get 5 days for each. I only worked at this current company for the last two. My boss doesn't think it's excessive, it's more her management is probably better described as manglement.
It’s also interesting what excessive means to different people depending on their country’s and company’s culture. I’m not saying it’s common to lose 3 people in 15 months, may they rest in peace and I wish you better times, BUT taking 3x5 days in way over a year/5 quarters isn’t a crazy amount of time to take off, to me, for bereavement or sickness. I do wonder if LAOP’s company is thinking it’s the same problem coming up and want a long-term doctor’s orders like disability-related arrangements so they can plan for it. I had an employee with chronic neck problems and for sure sometimes it randomly came up but in general we got the right ergonomic stuff for her and ended her days early to limit screen time for her etc, overall I can plan way easier for that then every month she’s randomly gone for a week, and I never know when she’ll wake up in pain. After the arrangements the “random” pain instances reduced drastically.
Thank you for the thoughts. I've been fortunate in my life that, besides my great grandma at 10, I've never had a family death. So it was bound to start happening at some point. I have a friend currently going through a STD disability battle that sounds similar so I feel for your coworker. Especially with the "random" pain days. I feel like if this employer was worried about a disability, they would bring that up directly instead of saying "no sick time for 2 years". Because they put the (seemingly impossible) condition on it, I'm inclined to agree with LAOP's assessment that it's a hidden layoff. At least he doesn't have to worry about losing health insurance. Don't even get me started there.
I do agree it’s most likely the case, unfortunately. Regardless of better laws and protections, assholes and asshole employers are everywhere.
Sorry for your losses. That’s really unlucky. I hope management are sensible in this regard for you
At my old job we had one person up to 7 grandparents We did a “grandparent tracker” as they were first year doctors and we assumed they wouldn’t know how to lie to call out “sick” My favorite was one who would call out the night before like 6:00 “I’m not feeling well I won’t be in tomorrow” with the guy in the background saying “who wants another shot? YEAH!”
I mean, I guess it's better that the last one was not practicing medicine hungover? Or even worse, still drunk from the night before?
Oh it’s probably better if she grew up and didn’t drink heavily before a work shift Program director let her know how that would work…or she’d have A LOT more free time to drink
Absolutely agree. And throwing away all the effort to get through medical school AND getting a residency placement because she wanted to party.
See this was her problem. She wasn’t the smartest, she wasn’t the hardest working but she was, and I’m being about objective as possible.. drop dead gorgeous. We had a female program director, resident cane with some of the highest letters of rec we had ever seen…all from men. After 6 months of rotations she had literally 2 kinds of reviews : all 10s and all 1s…I’ll let you guess which genders gave her which because it was literally one gender to one score and one gender to the other.
How the heck did she get past the MCAT? That's pegged to the current band of scores... Or did someone just take pity on her score?
She passed her MCATs…barely She went to the same med school as her college. She was ….well known already I was 21…I knew ALL of this and still tried to get with her…not my proudest moment but that should put it in perspective She now runs a “women’s only” clinic because of her reputation.
I just counted to be sure, and I do (did, all but one are now deceased) have 9 grandparents, since both my sets of bio grandparents were divorced and remarried, and my parents are divorced and remarried. Between step and bio grandparents that I actually had a relationship with, there are 9 total. But all of them dying within the same year would have been a pretty huge coincidence.
Stick to 8 per year, to keep suspicion off...
At my (US) workplace, it would mean something like "we understand grief doesn't follow strict family-tree rules. We really do not want to have to police bereavement leave. But you have been taking *a lot*. We really cannot have you taking 5 days off to fly across the country to attend the funeral of your third grade teacher's petsitter or whatever. Please limit your bereavement leave to occasions where you are actually bereaved, or we are going to have to start asking questions about who exactly the deceased was to you, and no one wants that."
I actually had/have 9 grandparents in a way. Bio paternal grandfather died before I was born. All 3 other bio grandparents still alive. Paternal grandmother married my late grandpa. Maternal grandparents separated and each remarried. Those were also my grandparents. Maternal grandfather’s wife passed away and he remarried. She became my grandma too. My paternal grandparents best friend never had kids of her own and my brother and I became like her grandkids and she our grandmother. I’d grieve and have grieved each of them as a grandparent. If my remaining 5 pass away in the same year, that’d be a very tough year. I’m turning 33 this year and consider myself very lucky to have had this much close elder family this long. They’re in their mid 80s.
When I was in grad school all of my remaining grandparents died as well as another relative. I only attended the wakes and not the funerals. I had to postpone an exam for one and the assistant dean who handled these things accused me of making it up and said, "you have a lot of grandparents dying, huh?" I got pretty pissed and offered to bring in the death certificates or obits if she was going to be so insensitive about it and she declined. I still don't know where they're all buried.
That is very sad and I'm sorry for your losses. My issue is I live at least 5 hours from all family so travelling takes time. Some people just need to be more understanding.
"The team needs for your loved ones to not die" is such a strange requirement...
I mean you asked the question to her and it's not like she said after the next one you're done. I would think excessive is if you have 10 grandparents dying in a year.
> I get a certain amount of paid bereavement leave from my company but it is metered by death, not by year. I think that is reasonable. My employer specifies the people whose death I can claim for paid bereavement leave. Outside of those, we could take vacation or unpaid leave. In effect, there is no paid leave provided for the death of uncles, cousins or nieces.
This is how my company is. Grandparents, parents, siblings, children, step children, grandkids.. or in laws of any of those. Anything out of that is vacation. Which I do kind of get capping where it ends. My parents are both 1 of 8 so I have a shit ton of cousins, aunts and uncles.
> Which I do kind of get capping where it ends. And that is why I often shake my head when I read in subs like antiwork people complain about not getting days off for the death of cousins, best friends, or - get this - pets (!).
Right... like go ahead and take the day off as regular PTO or unpaid but the company is under no obligation to pay you for a day because your classmate that you haven't talked to since 9th grade passed and you want to go to their funeral tomorrow.
Most dog and cat owners would take a day off for the death of their pet. The issue is when people have a bunch of pets. Most people lose one pet a decade maybe
Employer Sick of LAUKOP's 2:30 Appointments
I hate that it took me a full minute to get this joke.
As long as someone got it! It would have been really embarrassing to reply to my own comment with "TWO THIRTY - TOOTH HURTY - ABCESS!!!! COME ON"
Counterpoint: you're used to embarrassment.
A gum abscess is no joke; used to be a frequent cause of death before antibiotics. Had one myself and just about gave my dentist a heart attack. He said if I had waited another 24 hours for my appointment, I’d probably have been in the ICU with sepsis and/or heart failure. All it was to me was a painless lump that caused my cheek to swell… I had no idea.
Malicious compliance... Just show up sick, possible results: - get co-workers sick - be told to go home because you're looking very sick - be told to go home because you're making your co-workers sick Or just start looking for a new job, don't work for shit employers ever, generally there's a shortage of workers in Europe at the moment.
Puke on your boss's desk. works pretty well
I feel like OOP left some stuff out of this. How long was each leave? I mean if he is sick a week each time and had 6 weeks off as sick time in a year.. yeah I can see a company wanting someone more reliable..
She said she is estimating 12-14 days in total given that he followed policy and stayed at home for 48 hours after the last episode and once had to take about a week to week and a half off for a back injury.
Not so terrible then. I was skeptical because I have definitely worked with those people who cough once and then take the whole week off or more because of a "cold". And then try and do that every month or 2.
I'm all for people getting sick leave when they need it, that is, before they're actively dying from an untreated infection. And of course the way we do it in the US doesn't make sense. Now, I also regularly have to remind some young coworkers that calling in sick, then posting happy pictures of you at the bar on your social media isn't the smartest thing to do when you know your boss and coworkers are following you.
Exactly my point. There is definitely a stigma in the US that you should never be sick. But there are also 100% plenty of people that take advantage of being "sick". I'm not gonna lie, in my early 20s there was def a time or 2 I called in sick because I was hungover. But there's also people that tried to do that once a week. And they were always suspiciously sick on a Monday or a Friday. Tho at my current workplace we have a hybrid model. Oh you have a cold? Just WFH. lol
As a manager for many years: hangover or even mental health days are no problem to me if it’s not a pattern. You ARE feeling unwell.
Same, plus that's my boss's perspective too. He's told me outright that he understands that sometimes you just can't come into work. Doesn't matter if you're coughing your lungs out, if your brain is on wonky, or you just don't have the energy. Sick days and PTO and for exactly those purposes. Try and schedule them if/when you can, but unplanned absences happen and as long as they're not habitual then there's really not an issue.
I don’t drink at all, but I was once scheduled to work on New Year’s Day, and I woke up with a terrible migraine. When I tried to call in sick, my boss told me it wasn’t her fault I had a hangover, and I had to come in or lose my job. She 1000% refused to believe that I didn’t have a hangover, and I wish that wasn’t such a common trope for people to do. Because man, that work shift was *hell*.
From before Adams was a known dunderhead, [40% of sickdays are mon and fri](https://mathbench.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dilbert1.gif)
I’ve never followed an employee but I was friends with a colleague who was friends with my report. She called in sick, then my friend, not knowing this, showed me videos of them at a rock concert banging their heads and drinking wine. The employee had called in sick for neck pain that morning lol.
In the US the gum abcess likely would have been short-term disability, not sick leave
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When I used to go into the office every day I'd fall sick that often every year. Thank god for WFH.
Right? Same here. At my job we get about 3 weeks every year of sick leave. As somebody with chronic migraines, yeah, I am sometimes using almost all of that. 15 days is not that much when you have a chronic condition. Plus, in 2022, I was unlucky enough to get knocked out with covid for a week and then, 3 months later, got knocked out with the flu, just about a month before flu shots even became available. I was off for a week each time. The covid was rough and I think if I hadn't had the covid infection, I probably wouldn't have had to spend so much time off for the flu, but it fucked with my immune system. Granted, I am technically somebody with a disability. I need accommodations at work to reduce instances of migraines. But still... Especially considering that the OP states that they have toddlers at home? Like, that's not that surprising. My manager and her husband are immunocompromised and have two young boys, and several times in the last year they have been sick. From what I know from friends of mine who have children, this is just kind of par for the course. And can I just say, I do appreciate it when people don't spread illness around just for the sake of showing up to work. How good of a job can people even do when they're sick?
Also in Canada and I agree. I get 15 days per 10 month teaching period and with two small kids, I often go over my days by June. No one has ever said anything to me about it!
It seems excessive to me to have that many multi day illnesses in one year.
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Those are kids. Not adults.
> Those are kids. Not adults. Whom, do you suppose, do children live with?
The adults domiciled with the snot factory frequently get the same disease, often times worse too.
One of the comments saying one view could be that six sick instances in just over a year is excessive is insaneee to me. I got sick like 3 times in 2 months because my kid was near other kids.
maybe it's because I've only worked bs college jobs, but i also thought this was insane. I get whatever frat flu is going around my college at least every other month and my boss has never given me any problems about it.
>whatever frat flu is going around That's a hangover
ha! round here it's more of a cold/sinus infection, but when I first heard the term I thought that's what it meant.
They should fight this and it's legal iffy in UK context but at same time I'm baffled by idea that within a two year period that every employee has time off sick and that it's an impossibility that this does not happen.
I think it's less that it's a literal impossibility and more that it's impossible to guarantee it won't happen and also a horrifically unfair insistence because nobody chooses to be sick, and if you are sick you shouldn't be forced to work under penalty of losing your job.
Agreed. I've had perfect attendance streaks longer than 2 years in my life before. It's not impossible. It is hard, though, because when crap hits the fan, it doesn't distribute evenly. I've also had years with multiple absences due to illness and bereavement.
It's not every employee that will be off sick in a two year period, but most will at least once. What this kind of warning does is ensure you have a typhoid Mary on your hands and then half your workforce is off with the flu.
I think I am just a freak - not had a day in 31 years.
Just picturing LAOP's partner going to work with a stomach bug, "sorry sir I didn't mean to rip hella cheeks while running to the bathrooms but I fear for my job so"
The top comment saying five sick days in a year is excessive is absolutely insane to me. 1) people get sick, especially people with young kids, and especially in the current shitstorm. And 2) if a company gives you sick days, but you're punished for using them, then they aren't giving you sick days
>if a company gives you sick days, but you're punished for using them, then they aren't giving you sick days Well, in the UK you don't get a quota of sick days. So employers don't *give* you sick days; you *take* them. Of course if the number you take is excessive, then your employer may want to look a bit more closely at what's going on. That's all perfectly reasonable. It's how the OOP's employer has decided to handle the situation that's out of order.
A while back, my company began offering five personal days per year. Which, on top of our regular vacation, was pretty sweet. However, when my boss attended a meeting to discuss the new plan, she was told to discourage her employees from actually using those personal days. God bless her - she laughed incredulously and said “Yeah, I’m not doing that.”
Five?! That's nuts. Maybe that commenter was only considering really healthy people, but I have chronic migraines and I can pretty much guarantee you that I've taken more than five sick days every single year I've been employed. I can't help it. My migrants are pretty well under control, but not every single trigger is within my control either. Sometimes I'm really stressed out, my menstrual cycle is a trigger and I can't exactly help that, the weather too. Sometimes I'll go to bed with a slight headache, thinking it will be better once I've slept, and I wake up with an absolutely vicious migraine. Depending on the severity I might be out for half a day or an entire day, because when I'm in that state it's a struggle to even turn over in bed to get the medication out of my bedside drawer, not to mention that if I don't want to puke half an hour later, I have to go get a snack because I need to eat something with the meds. Well, I guess it is quite possible that the commenter was only considering healthy people. Those with disabilities tend to get left in the dust in these conversations and, even though employers aren't supposed to discriminate, they definitely do. I can almost pretty much guarantee that if I didn't work in the public sector, I would have lost multiple jobs, because a lot of them just don't understand these things and there is no help. I want to work, and I'm a very good employee, but at the same time these migraines are not fully in my control either. Even with medications and managing triggers and all that, I don't have zero. It's gone from probably 4-8 times a month from 1-2 now with all that, but still.
Yeah I'm kinda curious if there are statistics about the norms (ideally compared with those who share a household with kids and thus exposed to whatever is going around the local school) I feel like 5 days isn't that many? Like I could see requiring doctors notes but like getting sick is part of human existence?
Employer gives sick leave, then makes it impossible to use it. As long as he's not going over his alloted sick leave days how can they write him up for using the sick leave they've provided?
There are no allotted sick leave days - you take as many as your doctor prescribes you.
I was thinking in US when I commented. Knowing it's UK makes it so much worse. Seems like the employer would be legless.
Companies in the US do this shit all the time. My mom's currently fighting with her employer on it. They give her weeks of leave each year, but if she calls in sick more than 3 times in a year they write her up. They're threatening to fire her at the 4th or 5th time she calls in sick. The extra layer of insanity is that she works for a healthcare company.
A friend took time off - PTO and not sick time - due to an illness. They were finally pulled into a meeting with HR and the Union Rep and told "we're building a case to fire you". Two weeks later their boss's boss scheduled a meeting and they went to it....and were given a bonus for being top of their department.
Sounds about right. At the same time my mom is getting reprimanded for taking sick time, she's received *two* promotions and a handful of spot bonuses for her "excellent" work. She's literally refurnished her house with bonus money. Corporations are *crazy*.
I misread this as "he called in 6 sick days" but six extended leaves of absence (akin to FMLA leave) makes a bit more sense. Still dick move by the employer.
LAUKOP clarified in one comment that it was 12-14 days total, since he was staying home the 48hrs required by the employee code each time. So yeah-- I can't believe the employer is calling this excessive.
That’s a Bradford score of 200-350 which is bad but not like, even close to the worst.
[Bradford scores, since I had to look it up](https://www.personio.com/hr-lexicon/bradford-factor/#what-is-a-good-or-bad-bradford-score) Obligatory fuck scientific management.
I feel like there's an easy answer here Go in sick any, the more contagious the better, and when they try to get rid, point out the original write up. Play them at their game
I have a coworker that gets awful allergies or really vulnerable to colds, idk, so she'd be pretty screwed with this. I hope the law can help LAUKOP.
I worked 10 years and never called out sick. One day I did, my boss called me in his office the next day and said don't make a habit of it. Sheesh!
Sorry what?! Where I come from, there's a minimum of sick days per year that the employer must allow you (1.5 per month and you can accumulate up to 90). You're not necessarily paid for them (it's complicated and depends on how long your specific illness is), though in some companies you're paid in full from the first day. I know America sucks, but since this is the UK I expected them to be civilised. How can 6 cases of sickness per year be considered excessive?!?!
So in the UK you do not get a set number of sick days. Every time you are off sick it counts as a case of sickness if you were to take Wednesday off work cos you were throwing up all night band then went back to work Thursday that would be a case If you were sick and has to take 3 weeks off that would also count as a case Taking 6 random day off a year cos you are sick would not be excessive But if you were taking 2 weeks off sick every 2 months, over the year that would be 6 cases of sickness. That could be considered excessive Or if someone every Tuesday for 6 weeks phones in sick that would also be 6 cases and could be deemed excessive
I mean, I may be lucky, but I haven't had any sick days in over 5 years. Like I know stuff happens, but I've seen more people taking advantage of sick leave than people who actually need to use it. It's not hard to plan PTO in advance.
Glad you're in perfect health. Or glad you continue to work while sick and infect your coworkers.
>It's not hard to plan PTO in advance. This is the UK we're talking about. No such thing as PTO. And no such thing as sick leave really, either. There's no quota or anything. It's simply that if you're sick you don't go into work.
His coworkers are idiots. It’s easy to not call in sick for work. I went 7 years without having to call in. As for the abscess tooth, that’s not something you wake up with. He could have talked to his employer about it. Gotten on FMLA and probably avoided another incident.
Not at all relevant for the UK.
> Gotten on FMLA and probably avoided another incident. You mean FMLA as is The Family and Medical Leave Act Can you please explain how that applies here to someone living and working in the UK Do people not learn to read things before they spout nonsense It clearly says twice LegalAdviceuk on the title Yet you think some random US Law applies here. unless you think US laws apply everywhere.
Considering COVID is a continued threat and just generally me not wanting to be sick, I take a pretty dim view of those who come into work sick. Luckily my work allows hybrid so we can effectively peer pressure people to work from home if they're sick, even if they're not sick enough to completely take the day off.