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.
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.