Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

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E: Some of these details may be incorrect. See the posts below for some discussion.

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.

> 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

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.

Yeah I don't believe the parent either. What you're describing is basically how health leave works in most of western Europe : the employer pays for the first X days, then the state [aka. insurance provider] takes over for long term disability.

Well, i don't know the exact details. What i do know is, he is getting paid, but his employer (telekom support call center) is still needling him to provide information on when he'd be back and how he's feeling about his health.

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?

They might be asking for things that they're not really eligible to know, or fishing for a pretext to get rid of him. Employment courts in Germany are very employee-friendly, and most cases (90+ %) are settled. Lawyer fees are strictly based on the value of the case (i.e. how much money/compensation the case is about), and each party has to pay for their own lawyer no matter what the verdict is (a rule to financially protect the more vulnerable employee from being financially ruined by the large corporation with expensive lawyers), so the financial risk for firing someone which is then eventually judged to have been done illegally is relatively limited and financially very predictable.

But the rules regarding long-term sickness are clear: the employee only has to send them the renewed sick notes, that's it.

I think doktrin makes a better point, but this is information that is good to know too. I have edited the post above to point out that this stuff should be read too.

> Can you provide an explanation as to why they'd be still on his case if he's not costing them anything?

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.

This sounds the most reasonable explanation, yeah.

I don't know about Germany, but in the UK I believe it's possible to fiddle the system by going back to work for 2 days every 6 weeks (or whatever the max is, it's something like that), and then getting signed off again. This resets the clock.

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.

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