Amazon's Sick New Sick Policy
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If little Timmy gets the flu or something worse and you take a week or longer off to look after him because he can't go to school, your team is going to feel like your child has cost them money, which he has.
Not a good work way to build an environment based on affection and personal respect. Childless people will hate people with sick kids and if someone has a chronic illness that person is now a drain on the team.
Also a good way to ensure sick people heroically come to work and infect everyone else.
In germany workers have EXTREMELY strong sick protections and take every chance to get paid-sick-leave as mandated by law they can.
And the main way this happens is the flu, which knocks a person out of work for two weeks over here. And this is unavoidable, people get the flu, people get sick. It happens. Especially in group environments.
But if people are individually on the hook for their flu stuff, have it affect their bonuses, then they have an incentive to show up to work, not get their days counted, but get everyone else sick. Out of those there will be a number of people who do take the sick days.
However if you average the bonus sickday connection out over a group, then suddenly the sick people have an incentive to stay home. If they don't infect coworkers, they don't raise the sick days of the group en masse, thus affect their own bonuses, and everyone else's less than if they went to work sick and got everyone else sick too.
At least that's what i think the managers are thinking.
Whether that works out like this here, i can't even imagine.
The most likely explanation is simply that they're trying to shave "sickies" through peer pressure rather than managing large-scale infections.
Makes it even more likely that they thought like i did, even if those thoughts are not realistically useful.
I can however explain why it happens: This is done in Germany because especially in jobs where many people do the same thing and aren't paid very highly, people fake sick to get a day or two off. A relative of mine works as a train attendant, and around days where locally something big happens, or around national holidays (from which they're excempt) her coworkers suddenly send in slips about coughs and throat pains from their doctors at much higher rates than usual.
China will sit back and observe all this, and then at a time of their choosing, implement the majority of these businesses, but in a less insane way, and capture most of everything.
Ok, that is somewhat tongue in cheek, but I honestly do believe that we can't keep running things the way we do. Too much inequality, too much dishonesty, too much theft, too little morality, etc.
Some day, this is all going to come to a head, and something very bad is going to happen.
All is well then, nothing to worry about.
[Stats from mass media sources eg The Independent; prostate stat is supported by nhs.uk .]
Aside, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411479/ suggests we've got a mismatch with funding and health/societal costs of different cancers with Breast, Prostate and Leukemia all being relatively richly funded FWIW.
It pretty much eliminated bullshit sick call outs, especially for "illnesses" that hit during indesireable shifts like Thanksgiving and Christmas.
[1]: https://www.forsakringskassan.se/privatpers/foralder/!ut/p/z...
Here's California Labor Code section 246.5(o):
Diagnosis, care, or treatment of an existing health condition of, or preventive care for, an employee or an employee’s family member.
(o) http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
> I don't agree with the policy but surely you use vacation time not sick leave when your children are sick?
My reply to it is "No". I surely don't use vacation time instead of sick leave to care for sick family members. I can't really make this any clearer and as far as relevant to GP's point, it's an answer to their question. Even if we didn't have that system I wouldn't take out vacation days should this problem show up. It's not vacation.
At one co this causes some friction. Company policy was 20 vacation days and 10 sick days. A young healthy type guy would use maybe 1 sick day and 20 vacation days, for 21 days off a year.
Anyone with kids know they get sick a LOT. So basically anyone with any amount of kids would use all 10 for their kids. So parents go 10 sick + 20 vacation = 30 days off a year.
I guess enough people complained that they just combined the two into a single "PTO" pool of 28 days. That way you can take the 28 days if you have kids or not. I guess the downside is people with kids got less vacation, but it seemed bit more "fair" overall.
I personally don't view it that way (I say this as someone who doesn't have a child).
Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't incentivize having children by making extra allowances for that, but let's not pretend it's anything but unfair.
But if we're talking fair, why should they get a day to take care of their child but I don't get one to take care of necessary legal paperwork?
If as a species we don't raise children how will we continue to have life? It's not optional if we wish to continue the species; ergo it's "essential to life".
It's like you and the sibling comment decided to ignore my second paragraph entirely.
It's unfair, not a bad idea or illegal. Sometimes, we want options not to be fair because we're trying to incentivize behavior.
Incentivizing the continuation of the species is generally regarded as a good idea, so we make extra allowances for people who do that, even though it isn't fair.
You think you've made a point, but you really haven't. You don't have to take vacation time for that, you can always take unpaid leave - at least, everywhere I've ever worked. If you dispute using sick days for looking after children, perhaps you should examine your employment contract and perhaps consult an employment lawyer? There will be plenty of legal reasons why it's this way.
Feel free to apply to take a sick day while consulting the lawyer, too.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it's ridiculous to say it's fair when at a fundamental level, the exact point is that it's not.
Compassion.
Compassion isn't fairness. Fairness isn't the only criterion we should make decisions on. However, I was responding to the comment about it being fair, which to be honest, none of the replies have addressed and instead gone on tangents about why it might be a good idea for other reasons.
But also, what, compassion for their child being sick but not me having to defend myself against, eg, an unfair ticket?
Seems a very narrow kind of compassion. Why doesn't compassion apply to the legal case?
"Defending yourself against an unfair ticket" is a very different case than "I need to see my accountant" though - had you used that example in the first place I suspect you might've got a different set of responses.
On the other hand, most of the time I can work from home while tending to a sick kid.
I don't actually have a problem with taking time off for family reasons, but it does sound more fair to just give people a bucket of days and let them figure it out.
You see, parents aren't just slacking off. They are doing the responsible thing - not making a bunch of other children sick while taking care of their own sick child, whom they are responsible for and cannot yet take care of themselves. I'd not trust a 7 year old to take the right dose of medicines on time, for example, nor can the 7 year old go off to the doctor on their own. As you can see in your example, the parents are going to be home with their children regardless, even if using vacation, PTO time, or aren't paid at all.
Luckily, I'm now in a country that allows for this sort of thing.
That is a very European attitude. The American attitude is more or less "You choose to have kids, why should everyone else help pay for it?"
Some laws still help, for example you get a small tax break for kids. But it is a struggle. In some towns, the schools are literally falling apart due to age and lack of repair. The school has to do a local vote for approval for funds. The towns with > 50% of the people old and without kids living at home? They tend to vote NO over and over, preferring to have more money for cable TV and not fund other people's kids. (Ignore the fact themselves and their own kids went to the same schools years before).
Yeah, boy, it sure is an "off" day when I have to stay home with my vomiting kid. Gosh, I sure am sticking it to all those suckers who only get to be away from the office for 21 days.
Sarcasm aside, it seems like explaining that sick time isn't "off" time might help.
> Sick leave may be authorized due to personal illness or injury; to care for an immediate family member who is ill or injured and requires the personal attention of the employee
https://www.gov.uk/time-off-for-dependants/your-rights
Apparently there is an 18week unpaid parental leave entitlement for the period up to a child's 18th birthday, never knew that.
Amazon.DE employees have much further to fall before reaching benefits parity with Americans.
But I do get paid more than a typical European in base salary, so there is that.
The typical European get's paid for healthcare and a usable international public transit system.
So, there's that.
I largely agree with your points, but wasn't the person with a chronic illness a drain on the team before?
On the other hand, as far as the disease is not too bad, the person is still doing regular work like everyone else when it's here and you may really need the hands.
That's up to the environment. Amazon is in the business of cheap warehouse workers. It's very draining physically and it probably hates unpredictable leaves from employees. It's likely very unfriendly to chronic disease.
I'd also argue that because of them being a drag in other work environments, there already is enough social pressure to keep "fake" illnesses low. Humans are surprisingly sensitive to the disapproval of their team/tribe.
The bonus pool is likely finite and can be manipulated by sick people heroically infecting other teams to improve your team's metrics relatively.
This creates a virus spreading mechanism backed by human ingenuity within the company.
I, for one, welcome my new virus overlords in the hopes they spare my health.
No problem -- we can count on Amazon to just put few ambulances + paramedics outside for when people start collapsing at their stations. Just like they do during major heat waves:
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/workers-complain-about-...
Because it became a PR nightmare once their disgusting policy decisions became known.
What do you mean, "No"? Are you saying the reports of Amazon hiring "Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have ambulances and paramedics stationed at its two adjacent warehouses during five days of excessive heat in June and July", as per the article, were just fake news -- and if so, which parts?
You're right about what ultimately drove the longer-term decision to put in better AC, though.
No, they put in AC now.
There will always be people who'll do that, some out of sheer disregard for others and feelings of being a superhero by not letting a "little" thing like a 'flu stop them, but there are some really bad employers out there who discourage sick days through bad planning and poor decisions.
I just worked two days with someone who has a 'flu bad enough that he has a fever. He shouldn't have been there because he's infectious, and something of a hazard to himself. The only reason he came in is because the employer refuses to train backup staff, and holds each of us responsible for our jobs to the point of stupidity. (What do I mean by that? Old equipment fails, it's marked on the sheet as "operator error." Last week, a script generated incorrect job numbers and we had to restart production well into the run as a result of it - that wasn't accepted by management as an error, because it would never happen. Stupidity on the order of "that printout attached isn't proof of it, it comes from a printer and anybody can do that.")
Only if those people choose to go home. Otherwise you've got a sick team in the office trying to hold onto their bonuses.
If anything, the policy feels as if it skews toward minimizing compassion.
That is exactly what they're doing, and here's why:
Germany has a minimum wage. As long as they pay above that, they can mess with bonuses above that as much as they want.
But workers have an additional protection:
If they get sick, and a doctor determines they're unfit to work (which they happily do for anything that isn't straight-up faking it), the health insurance will start paying half their wage, and the company has to continue paying the other half. The company also cannot fire the worker (unless the worker indicates unwillingness to get better).
A relative of mine got cancer. The company he was with ended up paying his wages for over half a year, because they had no legal way of finding out what was wrong with him, and he indicated he intended to get back to work asap, despite knowing he would never again be able to.
So for german companies workers being sick can be a considerable money sink, especially if they are not determined to actually build loyalty with their workers. Those companies end up doing things like this. The german national rail company does similar things as well already.
I call BS. If you're off sick for 6 weeks in a row with the same diagnosis, the employer stops paying, and the employee has to apply for sick pay (Krankengeld) with their health insurance (Krankenkasse). No doctor is allowed to sign off a patient for longer than 4 weeks at once (i.e. the sick note has to be renewed every 4 weeks), this is even mandated by the public health insurances. So obviously there is no way for the employer to find out for how long an employee will be off sick in the long run, it's meant to be like that, and the employer shouldn't care about it because they're not paying salaries for sickness longer than 6 weeks. In addition to that, there's even a system in place, named "Hamburger Modell", to reintegrate long-term sick patients back into their workplace by working part-time hours, and it's even paid by the health insurance.
Source: was long-term off sick and went through the whole shpiel.
Maybe it's an oddity of MeckPomm, or something specific about cancer that allows this.
Can you provide an explanation as to why they'd be still on his case if he's not costing them anything?
But the rules regarding long-term sickness are clear: the employee only has to send them the renewed sick notes, that's it.
Staffing. He's still employed even if they're not paying him. That means that they need to take him into account when making new hires. If he suddenly returns after they've hired a de-facto replacement, they now have 1 extra employee.
The company I work for has paid people on sick leave for 1Y plus at times. I know of one case in which they actually paid off a sick employee to resign from the company.
Imagine you make $130k a year--that's about $65/hr in your eyes. But to the employer, factoring in the ancillary costs of benefits, and payroll taxes, you likely cost around $100/hr. What if instead, every person instead had their own little personal one-person LLC, and they worked as independent contractors? Then you would bill for hours worked, and you could get paid the $100/hr you actually cost.
The downside to this is that you don't get paid when you are sick, or have a child. But a more accurate way of putting that is that your coworkers do not subsidize/pay for your parental or sick leave. You'd have to get independent insurance to cover such situations. You would also get a solo 401(k) for saving, you'd get your own health insurance, and manage your own benefits in general.[1] It could be a bit empowering.
[1] A bit off-topic, but note that solo 401(k)s come with a higher contribution limit got $52,000 verses $18,000 for regular 401(k)s. I've also found that healthcare.gov offers a lot of choice (at least in New York, NY), and I'd rather my company pay me the amount they spend of health insurance, and I get my own care (provided there is an above-the-line tax deduction for health insurance premiums).
It's stories like this that make it easy for me to deny the Amazon recruiters when they bother me.
Same stuff and it goes both way.
There was a candidate who showed a counter offer from Amazon. We had a good laugh. :D
Easy pass tbh. Working for one of the "big 4.5" isn't worth some of the shit they pull.
No 'apart' about it. With Amazon, that concept simply never enters into the conversation.
From what I heard that wasn't the case in the rest of Amazon, which always made me feel a bit icky about working from said megacorp - along with all the other dubiously moral stuff. I'm rather a lot happier being out of there, I must say.
A court might disagree, but what's that to the individual who can't afford to keep a prestigious law firm on retainer?
Worst idea ever -- people would come to work with a full-on cold, coughing and sneezing all over the place. Just because they didn't want to "waste" vacation days being sick.
Now I work at a place with more traditional sick days separate from vacation days, and people stay home when they are sick. And are actively encouraged to stay home, no one wants to see a flu sweep through the entire engineering team.
But there is also half-hearted pressure from HR to consume more than about 30% of our total PTO, combined with unstated pressure from management in general to consume less than 50% of it. Everyone ends up worrying about the exact number of socially-acceptable days to take off per year rather than just living their lives. I've gotten used to it but when I hear about European standards, I'm just green with envy.
A) Use peer pressure to keep people at work even when sick. Incentivize coming to work regardless, because you don't want to "let the team down".
B) Incentivize a group to care about each others health. To keep sick people home (so they don't get more people sick), and to avoid putting to much stress on individuals (to prevent them from getting sick in the first place).
This seems like the culture of the group is going to drive it one way or the other, and kind of vacate the middle ground.
Is it because people were taking too many sick days in Germany ?
If so, then it means the company thinks that people were taking sick days when they shouldn't have, so they're indirectly calling their own employees liars and making them all pay for that.
Is it a way to save money ?
I didn't know things were so tight at Amazon ... In fact, next time I try to order, I'll remember to remember that the lower product prices are funded by people's sick pay...
Either way, very shitty move, Amazon.
Some European countries have very stringent laws to cover employees sick leave, potentially for very long time. That can cost sizeable money to companies and that goes against what American companies are used to.
While I was there, they cut back on janitorial service to save money. It basically has a similar impact to this policy: Exposing employees to more germs and health risks. I can't prove cause and effect (between this bad policy and their decline), but it looks to me like there is one (though I am not suggesting this is the sole cause of their decline).
Even if there is genuine malice, this is just stupid. Making sure people come to work sick and spread the germs does not lead to excellence. Quite the contrary.
My employer had to institute a policy that if you take sick leave on the work day immediately before or after a holiday, you need to bring a doctors note to receive the holiday pay. They did this because it was common practice to call in sick on Friday when Monday was a holiday, turning a three day weekend into a four day weekend.
Reminds me of a legal case in Ontario. Guy was fired for calling in sick in advance. He said he would be attending a wedding, or maybe a bachelor party, and would "be too hungover to come in" the following day.
The court sided with the guy that got fired. Recovering from a hangover, even a scheduled one, must be treated as a sick day... and you can't fire someone for taking a sick day.
In reality, it probably will lead to people coming into work when they are sick. However, for serious sickness, like the flu, it'll probably lead to people taking vacation time.
Thankfully, that's not legal in a lot of countries. Vacation time and sick leave are two separate things workers are entitled to. I'm not on vacation when I'm sick, I'm miserable in bed. Not out enjoying a cocktail on a sandy beach.
But even better, if I'm sick on vacation I can actually swap out vacation days for sick days and recover my vacation time. I can spend all of my vacation days on actually being on vacation, even if I get food poisoning on vacation.
This was policy at my former employer. People showed up sick all the damn time and flu season was invariably a disaster.
Next time an employer presents me with this brilliant stratagem they can absolutely shove it. If people are sick they should damn well stay home, and incentivizing them to sneeze all over their coworkers is myopic.
Miraculously people manage it. Somehow I never get sick on the weekdays and then I can feel my body collapsing on the train on Friday night as I am no longer able to push the sickness back.
I'm not sure what I would do if I had children (and I really want to have them). Fighting sickness as a single man is not the same as fighting sickness when you have elementary school kids in the house.
Get the flu vaccination. I haven't gotten the flu since I started with the vaccinations, while everyone around me was felled by it.
It's one thing to feel righteous staying home to keep from infecting others at the office, but an even better thing to get vaccinated and not transmit it to anyone.
Your lucky; vaccinated people get the flu all the time. The flu vaccine is designed to predict against a set of strains that are expected to be most significant in the upcoming flue season, but, aside from the usual problem of vaccines being less than 100% effective at what they target, there are lots of flu strains that aren't targeted by the vaccine, and often the predictions as to which ones are most important to protect against turn out to be wrong.
It's good to get the flu shot, but it's not anywhere close to a 100% guarantee.
I know, it's around 60% effective. But even if you still get the flu, the symptoms are reduced.
Your point is valid but not justification for not not getting the vaccination. It's irresponsible to not get it. It's free (under Obamacare), and if you don't care about yourself, there are other people who for various reasons cannot get a shot and can die from the flu.
If you still get one of the covered strains (or similar strains) despite the vaccination, the symptoms are reduced; it's generally ineffective against other strains.
> Your point is valid but not justification for not not getting the vaccination.
Since my point was fairly explicitly that you should get the vaccination, but should not expect it to eliminate the need to take sick days for the flu, I agree with this but find it something of a non-sequitur. "It's good to get the shot" is, indeed, not a justification for not getting the shot.
Funny you mentioned this as Amazon is no different. In US Amazon do not give sick days unless required by state law. Say you get an offer from Amazon NY, where employer isn't required to provided paid sick days, you'll get zero sick days.
I have no idea how other people put up with this shit.
At the top-level, you know people are not slackers. They want to do their best to contribute. It is true that goals are not always aligned, etc.
In the modern world, it seems we have lost our humanity. This story, the United airlines story, and so many examples. I don't think things are worse off than they were in the dark ages of course. But I think we don't have an excuse to be jerks anymore - partly because as a society we have abundance or sorts. Not just pointing fingers at Amazon and United, but collectively, as a society, we need to clean up our act soon or I fear things will get worse and worse for everyone (rich and poor).
Where I work if you're sick or a kid is sick, that means work from home via VPN, just like if they called you for an emergency at 2am except its 2pm. If you're not a total loser or slacker your boss won't expect much "work" especially if you're genuinely sick, but even if all you do is idle on instant messaging and reply to emails, they're getting at least some kind of value out of you more so than a sick day and if you accomplish anything, however slow, plus for the bean counters you're not logging a sick day. Actually burning an actual literal sick day frankly means you're going to baseball opening day or a job interview or you're in the terminal stages of your career so to speak (bad relationship with company or boss), or maybe you feel cheated out of vacation days so you pad mondays and fridays with more than 2/5th of sick days etc.
Obviously jobs or employers incompatible with VPN work are a different scenario.
Sick day in the 90s mean literally sick, like the flu, whereas in the 10s if I have the flu I just work from home very slowly and literal sick day means "go local professional sports team go" or similar unscheduled vacation.
The thing that scares me is if this doesn't backfire and affect the bottom line, it could set a precedent elsewhere. With no real unions to speak of in many places (and in some cases, legislation that makes forming unions harder) it will be hard to fight back against.
It is actually interesting that if I go to work sick and get a couple others sick, it will cost me more money than if I had stayed home to begin with.
A manager once told me that a member of his team was sick for exactly two weeks every year. Coincidentally, the company offered 2 weeks paid sick time. He said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't get a raise as a result.
In another company I knew, it was well known that a sunny day after many days of rain resulted in a spike in sick days.
In theory it might encourage group-consideration when you're sick though.
https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home
Is this all really true?
I just don't get why Amazon bothers with trying to shave off what, in total, cannot amount to more than 1/3 of 1% of its costs, considering how much these policies have cost them in bad PR, and, possibly, pangs of conscience.
If they managed to reduce packaging material by 50%, they could easily double the salary of everyone in the warehouses, and still have enough over for all-you-can-snort blow at headquarter's x-mas party.
A given individual may not have much control over whether or not they get sick, but then can influence whether or not they share that illness with their colleagues. The individual allowance has a stronger incentive to return to work vs the pool, because there is no cost to the individual if their colleagues become ill. With a pooled allowance, there is a cost to the individual if they make their colleagues ill.
Being a place where people want to go when they wake up in the morning, improves attendance and many other things.
Typically collective punishment is used against out groups, in order to get out groups to police themselves in their interactions with your in group (vs. in group members, where individual punishment is used.)
Apparently Amazon employees are an out group for Amazon corporate.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated to Expedia. I just interview everywhere to find out whom I can extract the most money, holidays and sick days from.
Germany requires what amounts to unlimited sick time (with variations on pay details), so there is nothing to transfer. This is just punishing people for their teammates getting sick. (So it encourages people coming in sick, but avoiding teammates. But maybe still taking meetings with other teams, since getting members of other teams sick doesn't hurt your bonus, and if it's splitting a limited pool among teams may even help it.)
2) Lie down on a desk for half the day because you're half dead.
That's the last time I had to handle a sick leave in France. It didn't shock anyone. Normal practise.
Gotta adapt when you can't take sick days.
/Darwin Award
(Anecdotally, I increasingly see people complain they have been job hunting for a long time and can't find a job, plus the UBI discussion is ongoing. Both of these support the idea that the job base for traditional employment is shrinking.)
On that note - so what are people's latest recommendations for AWS alternatives (for those services which do have reasonable alternatives)? In particular - any significant updates to the following recommendations, in the last 6 months or so? My group will be making some decisions soon, and I always prefer not to go with AWS unless there (absolutely) no comparable alternatives available.
[1] "Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12621716
Moving from a small (10 person) company to a building with 1000 people in it I went from almost never being sick to getting sick 3+ times every winter.
Strongly encourage your employees to stay home when they're sick as long as they're getting their jobs done. If they're out frequently or for a long period of time (4+ days) require a doctor's note. That's your sick policy. Done.