Why Americans don't take sick days | Hacker News Reader

Why Americans don't take sick days

bbc.com

45 points_of83 comments

I get five sick days a year. Toward the end of last winter I got sick several times and used four of them.

So for the rest of the year, say my insomnia shows up and I've been awake since 8 AM the previous day, I go to work anyway. I get maybe two hours of work done all day, but I sit at my desk and that's apparently what's important. That's only happened once this year, but it was Monday this week so it's fresh in my mind.

It's stupid. But I've got one sick day left and I might need it worse come flu season.

There are plenty of things I like about my job, but our time off policy is not among them... In the tech industry I'm guessing this is less common because it's not easy to hire good programmers. In other industries, I doubt it's an unusual experience.

I work in tech, and in almost all of my engineering jobs I've had, if someone is sick they just work from home.

"Work", yup, I see this too. To fully pull it off though you still need to be somewhat responsive to emails / IMs for the 'normal business hours'. Sometimes it's worth burning a PTO day to just go back to sleep, sick or not, and really start the day around 3pm without thinking about work at all until the next day's morning.

I wouldn't work if I used PTO; makes no sense. I'd rather arrange a shifted schedule for the day

> I sit at my desk and that's apparently what's important.

After everything it indeed sometimes feels like it comes down to this. They want to see you physically sitting at your desk for at least 8 full hours, that's the only 'measurement' in productivity that most companies seem to care about.

What is the consequence of the OP not showing up at work? Does he lose paid days? Does he get fired? How does his company track sick days? At every company I've worked for there's usually a formal sick day arrangement, but often sick days are less formal; you email or call your boss and tell them you're sick and they tell you to stay home. Rarely does the boss actually record that event. This is different company to company but I'm betting a lot of people put more on themselves about staying home than they should.

It's fairly formalized here. I work at an architectural lighting manufacturer, and the construction industry is very phone-based. I'm sure most electrical contractors have smartphones by now, but most of the questions from the field still come in as phone calls. So we're expected to keep good coverage of the phones, and if I'm not around then everyone needs to know to direct technical calls to someone else's desk.

Sick days do get logged, and if I really need more time off I can start burning vacation days. Given the choice, I'd rather spend a shitty sleep deprived unproductive day at work.

Eventually goes up to 10 sick days, but I don't remember when the threshold is. Frankly it's a strange thing to base on seniority, as if newer employees somehow get sick less?

Where I work, days off are logged but only to make sure you aren't "abusing" the informal policy. Abuse means you get treated more formally and may be told "No, you need to come in today."

Email/call in sick, stay at home. There is an implicit "stay a little later when you're feeling better and/or make up lost time on the weekend". As long as nothing falls behind it isn't an issue. That's the informal policy. If you were ahead or don't fall behind - the extra hours don't need to be picked up. The only important thing is that things remain on schedule.

Hungover, sick, just don't feel like coming in that day, doesn't really matter.

I take it you can't WFH? because that's what it's for. I just don't take time off because we have "unlimited", I just let my coworkers and customers know when I'm unavailable, but never really report it as it doesn't affect my pay whatsoever.

Conceivably all of my work could be done from home. But one portion of it would require a company provided cell phone that they could forward my extension to, and the other part would require me to run a bunch of expensive commercial software (yay CAD) on my home computer, with license servers set up to support it. Or if they don't want to let personal computers on the network, I'd need a relatively beefy company PC.

None of that's impossible, but doing it for the whole company is apparently enough effort/money that we haven't done it.

We do have a couple of remote employees, and they're a hassle with our ancient phone system. Once you transfer a call out to them there's no way for them to pass it back to the internal system. It's not a good setup for people who are frequently taking technical calls but need to send ordering/pricing questions to coworkers in customer service and quotations.

The idea that you have a certain number of sick days per year baffles me. It's not like you have a full control of when you get sick.

Your employer also doesn't have control of when you get sick.

They can encourage presenteeism (e.g. by a fixed number of sick days, policies requiring doctor notes for just one day ill) so sick people spread their germs. They can overwork you and cause stress.

In my experience, managers are particularly good at coming in and spreading germs because they "had an important meeting and so much to do."!

Ugh, yes. At the beginning of last winter, one manager INSISTED on coming in with this really horrible, wracking, deep cough, and the resultant spread managed to take out about half the management team and a ton of floor staff variously over the next month or so (including myself - how grateful I was). I'm sure it was totally worth it for the one or two meetings they attended..

They've gotta show up. How else would anyone know they were doing stuff if they didn't make up meetings to attend?

Of course, and that's why in EU the government pays your salary(or % of it) after couple weeks of being sick, so your employer does't have to.

I had a similar setup at a late stage tech startup that ended up going public while I was there. So not all companies in any industry will fit the mold of how you might expect them to behave.

Also, I recall my time in Japan where I had 0 sick days and 10 PTO days for the year. The explicitly communicated expectation was that PTO was to be reserved for weddings, funerals, and sick days. Also, doing everything possible to not get sick was described as part of your professional obligation.

So even my relatively poor benefits at said SV startup was leagues beyond what I had as a salaryman soldier. ;)

Ridiculous sick day policies are sort of covered here: http://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/10-dumb-rules-that-make-your...

They only discourage people from keeping contagious colds away and at home which means more get affected and hurt office productivity more!

And the fact that most companies claw back your granted vacation at the end of the year means you can't save a couple of days for colds over the winter.

Pretty easy to sum this up: people don't take sick days because:

- They aren't given that many

- Medical expenses are HUGE

- There's societal pressure to not take them

- It's easier to fall behind in work (and get fired if you do)

I really should count my blessings - I rarely feel sick enough to take a sick day - maybe at most once a year. I understand that other people aren't like that, and I'm fine with that. As long as everyone is doing their part, and we're all pulling together, it's all good.

Probably the same reason they vote against their own interest all the time. We're all convinced we'll be super rich soon.

I remember reading something about this... do you have a link?

"temporarily embarrassed millionaires" — http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-socialism-never-took-...

It's a common trope usually referring to poor/middle class people that vote Republican because they believe they will be well-off one day and benefit from lower taxes and less welfare.

It comes from a quote attributed to John Steinbeck: Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Reminded an episode of the west wing:

> It doesn't matter if most voters don't benefit. They all believe that someday they will. > That's the problem with the American dream. It makes everyone concerned for the day they're gonna be rich

http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTransc...

example: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-Ame... "The largely blue collar citizens of Kansas can be counted upon to be a "red" state in any election, voting solidly Republican and possessing a deep animosity toward the left. This, according to author Thomas Frank, is a pretty self-defeating phenomenon, given that the policies of the Republican Party benefit the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the average worker."

Reminds me of "Bar Association" from Star Trek Deep Space Nine[0]: "Bashir says casually that he should petition Quark to add vacation time and sick leave to the bar's employees by forming a union to help them stop being exploited, however Rom tells Bashir that Ferengi do not fight against exploitation but instead work to become the exploiters. "

[0] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Bar_Association_(episode)

My company has unlimited sick days. I've used none in my 2.5 years here. It's not that I don't get sick, but somehow I get sick while on vacation. Yep that's fun.

I see the doctor for checkups, I had many appointments to accompany my wife to the OBGYN, and appointments for my new baby...I don't take time off for those.

If I'm feeling under the weather I stay home and do a bit of work. If I had actual sick days I would be more inclined to take an entire day off, especially if towards the end of the year.

When I worked for the govt I took mental days...day where it would be pointless to come to the office because I'm not motivated and would be unproductive. After a day off I'm good to go. Counted that as sick.

In much of the EU, if you get sick on holiday, you can claim your holiday back:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/6190826/...

Yes, because your holidays are for recreation not for recuperation. When you're sick, you're sick. Go home, get rest, forget about work. Makes happier and more productive employees since you treat them as human beings.

Please stay home if you're sick. The productivity loss due to you not coming in < the productivity loss due to you coming in and infecting your coworkers.

This is how it should be, but with some employers aggressively punishing people for being sick (e.g. docking pay, forcing make-up time, outright firing people for "poor performance") there's no incentive for people to look out for anyone else.

Instead come in, muddle along, and infect everyone.

If my employer won't give me sick days, I'm not going to burn vacation unless I really, really don't feel like coming in.

Yup, employers often fail to see how they are incentivizing contagion in their offices by having the sick day policies they do.

Productivity loss is a bad angle to argue this. Why should an individual worker put productivity of the company first if the company will penalize him for doing so?

Because in this case it aligns with their interests of not having to work while sick.

That's IMHO not a reason to value the argument of improved productivity any higher.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't consider staying home, or that you shouldn't consider your coworkers health while making the decision. If company productivity is critical to you (keep company afloat) it's in your interest to value it highly as well, if not it is one of the weakest arguments.

>Please stay home if you're sick. The productivity loss due to you not coming in < the productivity loss due to you coming in and infecting your coworkers.

If my being sick is a problem with my employer, I am more than happy to let him reduce the productivity of his employees.

Food service employees don't usually get sick days and sick days aren't required by law. Imagine how many people they infect.

It's not right right to put that responsibility on individual employees.

It's the employer's responsibility to maximize productivity across their work force. If they want to reduce infection to maximize productivity then it's their responsibility to make sure employees have enough sick time. If management doesn't care enough to have a reasonable policy, why should individual employees care about overall productivity?

My company /says/ they don't want people coming in ill, but policies state you must get a doctor's note for even 1 day's absence (doctor's really don't like you wasting their time) and the HR portal shows you a score relating to your time off. Also, managers love coming in all to show how dedicated they are! Joy.

Is it common for programmers to have a fixed number of "sick days?"

The only time I ever had to keep track of sick days and vacation days is when I worked for the government and it was awful. There is no reason to do that to white collar workers.

There are two common schemes: one that combines vacation and sick leave in "Paid Time Off" ("PTO") banks and one that tracks them separately. It is almost uniformly the case for programmers outside the Bay Area to work for companies with one or the other (usually the former).

This is one reason why I think it's funny when developers mistakenly think of their managers and higher as "colleagues." Software developers are much closer to blue collar workers than white collar workers from a social status perspective.

"White collar" doesn't have to do with management or social status.

White collar work is in an office setting. Blue collar work is manual labor.

Telemarketers are white collar. Construction managers are blue collar.

White collar means a job that traditionally would require a suit and tie. Blue collar means a uniform.

That is the origin of the word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collar_workers

But so few jobs require suit and tie compared to 60 years ago, that the definition has shifted to "office job" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-collar_worker.

Yup, which is why I used the word "traditionally".

Very traditionally.

My experience: the three companies I've worked for as a Software Engineer in the USA all tracked vacation and sick leave as two distinct buckets. Vacation gets paid out when you leave the company, sick leave does not.

If I'm sick and out of sick days I can either go in to work (infecting everyone else), burn a vacation day, or (presumably) not get paid. I've never been willing to risk trying the third option, and since I don't have a ton of vacations days, I'm most likely to pick the first one.

We have .. both. I think it works better than it sounds. We 'get' 10 sick days per year. If we require more than 3 consecutively, we need a doctor's note. If we require more after those 10, we need a doctor's note (even if it's 1 non-consecutive day).

I guess I get it .. there needs to be some catch to stop the system being abused. But at the same time .. if it's too low, the employer is abusing us.

Many of the companies I've worked for had unlimited or flexible sick-day policies because having a fixed # of sick days doesn't make sense. But lots of companies do this for some reason.

To me, one of the biggest advantages of being self-employed is that I don't have to keep track of vacation days anymore. I can take as many as I want, but I pay for them myself. It seems a bit odd that something that I consider an important and natural right for workers is to me personally such a source of stress. Of course an important factor is that I get enough pay to be able to take time off whenever I want to. If people need the money, they're more likely to keep working and never take time off to relax.

I find the concept of limited sick days very odd. How can you possibly plan your sickness? When you're sick, you're sick, and shouldn't be going to work. Especially not when you've got something infectious that might make your co-workers sick too.

I had no idea that my country (Netherland) had the most generous law in this regard. The Dutch system sounds fairly obvious to me, and it works very well. Healthy, happy workers don't stay at home sick. Of course there are people who do abuse the system, but when people call in sick unusually often, it's generally a sign of a deeper problem, like hating their job or not being motivated to do it. And those are problems that need to be solved, not ignored.

I, like so many around me in the Bay Area, work at a startup. Sick days are not even something that I can contemplate at an early stage startup.

That's not the only way to run a startup. People should go home if they're sick and rest. That's how you get better and become more productive in the long run, in addition to just being the right thing to do.

Yeah the last start-up I worked at we had "unlimited" time off. I took almost a week off when I was sick once. The only time I've ever done that in my life but since it was unlimited time and I felt so awful (even went to the doctor's!) I thought I should finally use my generous benefit.

Let's just say a non-critical component I was working on was delayed by me being sick and it was counted against me later on. I noped right the fuck out of there as soon as I could.

Always be skeptical of the ones offering "unlimited" time off. Because it's never unlimited, in my experience.

Unlimited time off and zero days time off are pretty much the same thing.

If they really wanted you to take time off they'd have a minimum, but strangely few "unlimited" companies do, why is that? Most non-unlimited companies give you a set amount that "expire" which essentially encourages you to use them all (which is a GOOD thing).

PS - And no doubt there will be an anecdote below about the one company that does have a minimum. My point is that that company is a unicorn, most unlimited companies have no minimum and don't legitimately expect/want you to take a lot of days.

With unlimited they're not giving you PTO when you leave the company. It's a real nice way to give a finger. If anything the policy should be X many PTO hours but past that it's still unlimited.

Couldn't agree more. I assume that somewhere in such contracts there is a limit similar to how cell phone carriers' "unlimited" plan is always limited or some clause with more generic language doing the same thing. Otherwise what's to stop one from coming in the first day and taking a year off afterwards? Can an employer in an at-will state fire an employee for taking his vacation according to company policy? Or, someone could come in for the first day, then start taking days off. At some point, I'm sure the employer will fire them, but they still have to pay the employee for all those days off.

More broadly, my question is this: Since clearly, you cannot have unlimited vacation, what is the actual legal language in contracts at such companies that creates the situation of "unlimited" vacation and what exactly is that situation legally (since it's obviously not unlimited vacation)?

Yup I have "unlimited". It's "recommended" to take at least 2 weeks. Greater than 4 weeks requires executive approval though!

Do you think this reflects more on this particular employer or unlimited time off policy?

I just view the unlimited as equal or greater than industry average days. Most companies give 20 days vacation plus sick in my area so I feel untitled to that much. The rest is just icing on the cake if I get.

> Do you think this reflects more on this particular employer or unlimited time off policy?

Hmm not entirely sure. I've seen unlimited not work out very well for some of my friends as well so I feel like it's more of a reflection on the policy but it's all anecdotal. I think it can work out really well but only if there is a base amount of PTO (so you can get paid out when you quit / end of year) and if they require you to take a certain amount off.

Unlimited time of is nothing more than an accounting trick used by companies. In many jurisdictions accrued PTO belongs to the employee and is a liability to the company. If an employee quits the company in such jurisdictions are on the hook to payout the accrued PTO. Many of these companies don't really like or want their employees to take time off so the PTO just accrues until the employee jumps ship for their next endeavor and the company now has a month or two of salary to payout. Some companies will have a use it or lose it policy where none or only some carries over at years end. This helps limit the liability and amounts employees can accrue but again if the company really doesn't want their employees taking time off and only use this to cover the liability then employees will start calling out the company and it will get a bad name... so that is how and why we now have unlimited (and non accruing PTO). Eliminating a month or two of salary liabilities helps make the balance sheet look better (to investors)...

Sick days are a terrible concept.

If I have a mild headache, can I take a sick day? What if it's November and I haven't used any sick days? What if I'm nauseous when I wake up, but I'm fine by lunch? Can I use sick days for psychological reasons? What if someone sees me in public and thinks I don't look sick? Should I follow these rules, or can I fake a phone cough as well as my co-workers?

Just give me an allotment for paid time off (and maybe unpaid time off), and let me run my life/work balance.

>If I have a mild headache, can I take a sick day?

Yes.

>What if I'm nauseous when I wake up, but I'm fine by lunch?

Take half a sick day?

>Can I use sick days for psychological reasons?

Yes.

>What if someone sees me in public and thinks I don't look sick?

When taking a sick day, limit your public outings to the doctor / pharmacist.

A day at the beach is good for my claustrophobia.

We call those 'personal days' and they count as sick days.

Giving specific benefits often ends up going along with requiring specific proof of need for the benefit. I had classes in college where attendance was part of the grade. Additionally if you had to miss a class due to being sick, you had to produce a doctor's note. The attitude for myself and others was largely fuck that, I'm not going to the doctor for a cold or flu. I'll just come in and infect everyone, hopefully the administration/teacher who introduced such a policy...

In my case, the employer had a great "take what you need" policy when it came to sick leave. Vacation hours were earned, up to 6 weeks worth of hours a year, but you could bank up to 8 weeks of hours. The only catch was "be responsible".

As a father with two little kids who are always getting sick, this was great. It was useable for their visits for shots and times when my wife could not change her schedule easily (she does by appointment, in-home yoga/physical therapy, can be tricky to bail on a person that needs your help on short notice). I still had the ability to stay home if I got sick at some point (which happens way more with kids).

This was the way for years. Until this year. Now it's a hard 5 weeks of combined sick and vacation time.

With plans already set up for the year, plane tickets booked, for weddings, vacation, etc. I'd burned it all up by June. So here I am with 3 days of vacation/sick leave left. If I get sick now I'm going to work.

That, coupled with losing a non-trivial amount of vacation hours has caused people to leave here in droves (with other mgmt issues coming in after the sick/vacay policy change and doubling the insurance premium). I don't really know what they were thinking as every other high tech company around us has a much better sick/vacation policy, better insurance. They can afford it, according to HR/accounting folks I talked to at happy hours. They're just making the numbers look better for their own benefit.

So TL;DR (and having read this article, far too frequently) the real answer management screws us out of it.

I don't have sick days, they just come out of our vacation days. Management thinks if you give people "sick days" they will say they are sick when they aren't just to get a day off.

I take sick days when I hurt my back and can't get out of bed but end up with my phone and iPad in bed taking emails and attending meetings/calls

Not trusting your employees is usually a bad sign.

I get ~40 days of vacation and unlimited sick leave (France). I use all of the vacation because of children but otherwise I would probably take half of them. The fact that I have unlimited sick leave helps to never be sick, actually. I guess that this is some kind of positive psychological feedback.

This is one of the reasons I'm at my job despite the 15-20% salary penalty. 40 vacation days, 25 sick, 5 personal.

This year we did a week in June and nearly 3 weeks in October for vacation. :)

40 vacation day is unimaginable in United States.

"Sick days" are unimaginable in Europe.

Oh gee let's not get pneumonia because I've got not more sick days left after that flu from last week. Ridiculous concept.

I live & work in the United States. ;)

One of the last companies I worked for I had all of 3 sick days per year. If I used them now what if I get flu later in the year?

Then you either have to use your vacation days or not get paid for any day not in the office.

...that was an easy question.

Thats why no one uses sick days though... Companies need to be more willing to keep sick employees away unless they want the entire office getting sick and killing productivity.

>If I used them now what if I get flu later in the year?

Walk into the head of HR's office and tell them about it. Make sure you become a close talker and linger around a few minutes. Maybe leave a tissue in the trash can. They probably came up with the policy.

If you don't get anywhere, go into your boss's office and their boss' office and do the same. Definitely don't go to your peer's office / cube.

Because I don't get any sick days and never have?

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