The Confederation of British Industry are moaning again about sick leave.
UK bosses suspect that one in eight of all UK workplace absences are due to staff faking illness, research by the CBI suggests.
The CBI are urging employers to crack down on this pernicious menace, after their survey revealed that employers suspected that 12% of illness was bogus. The article doesn’t make any comment on how the employers arrived at that figure.
I have a suggestion for employers: add up the working hours that you believe are lost by this mythical, unproven level of 12% swinging the lead. Then add up all the lunchtimes your employees work through to get their jobs done, all the times they come in early - unpaid - or stay late - unpaid - to get their jobs done. Add in all the time they spend when they take work home, or answer an urgent call while on the middle of their holidays, or wake up at five in the morning turning work over and over in their mind because they are anxious about a problem at work they can’t solve anyway because their employer has not given them enough staff or resources to do it.
Add up all of that, and take it off your first figure. Then, if it the number you are left with is positive - if it’s positive - come back and moan about it.
And if it’s negative…
Yours is a splendid blog… would reading be included in the “not doing anything” ethic… I often not do my job because I am lost in a novel or a short story…
“Add up all of that, and take it off your first figure. Then, if it the number you are left with is positive - if it’s positive - come back and moan about it.”
Hear hear.
I was thought to be making up my illness for years until I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. If they had taken into account all of the work that I did at home - often whilst off sick (more than three times per hour as compared to ‘at work’ with all of its attendant distractions) - then they might have been sad to lose me when they would not make accommodations and let me work at home and so end up taken to court under the UK DDA…
Just discovered your blog. I used to be caught up in the cult of work and productivity. I’m 40 and for most of my career I’ve tried to be a “company man,” working harder and more efficiently than other people. Only recently has it dawned on me how unsatisfying it is, and ultimately futile (two of the companies I worked out went from prosperous to out-of-business in a few years). I watched a LOT of people caught up in the rat race who fell flat on their faces, and even the “successful” ones seem miserable. We need a worldwide rebellion against this Cult of Productivity!
Thank you all for your comments, and I hope you enjoy continuing to read the Sloth Ethic.
jcr: there is nothing better than relaxing with a good book, forgetting the world for a moment or two and letting the time flow by unheeded. It is the very definition of a slothful pleasure.
natalief: yours is an awful story but one I suspect happens so often. And yes, it is so much more productive when you are working at home, isn’t it?
anon: cult is the right description. Isn’t it wonderful when you realise that there is something more to life than the grind? As the saying goes, who ends up on their deathbed saying “I wish I spent more time at the office”?