Amazon is using peer pressure to keep German workers from calling in sick | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is using peer pressure to keep German workers from calling in sick

qz.com

41 pointsdsr1225 comments

Heavily discussed 12 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14091880

This is sick.

> workers are not required to provide a doctor’s note until after the third day they stay home with an illness.

There are ways for employers to require on the first day if abuse is suspected. Amazon should stick to established employment practices than to come up with contractual innovations that undermine the spirit of the law. The risk that a worker is becoming sick belongs firmly in the realm of the employer and not of co-workers. Shifting that is abuse of power.

Amazon is also known to abuse how companies doing deliveries are supposed to work for them, forcing many people to work more hours than allowed by German law regarding drive hours per day and pause times.

This has already been discloused by undercover journalists, with GLS being one of the worst cases.

An employer can ask for a note on the first day, there is no law against that. Employers don't do that because it's incentives sick employees coming in which gets expensive when all of them do stay home.

> Germany is known for its generous labor practices, including paid sick days.

I know Americans aren't used to employees having rights but the country that's known for its generous laws isn't Germany, it's France.

What they mean is that it's being generous compared with the US.

Exactly. Many European countries have similar laws.

Which, as everyone that lives in a Developed country outside the US knows, is not saying much.

It's a genuine shock to see "paid sick days" considered notable; a real reminder of what we have (and, as this case with Amazon shows, need to work to keep; I have no doubt that this if this works out as Amazon hopes, they have an onwards plan to take more - maybe I'll see what the union is up to these days).

To me it's surprising to see employers paying sick days. Why not have a public insurance that pays them just as if you were unemployed or had a serious medical condition that made you unable to work?

I thought Europe was mostly the latter (public insurance) while the US used employer pays. Edit: here the employer pays days 2-14 (no pay day 1, public insurance from day 15). Im not sure if there is s limit in days per year (I believe there isn't)

Having employers pay sick days must mean people with a history of illness are less attractive employees.

Paid sick days is just like any other insurance - the larger the pool the better. I'm assuming employees insure against this though?

In Germany, when an employee has been sick for 6 weeks and is still unable to come to work, the employers obligation to pay them for their sick leave ends and the employee is moved over to Krankengeld, which is about 75% of their monthly net income and is paid for by the mandatory public health insurance.

There's also non-mandatory corporate insurance products for employers that will pay for the mandatory sick leave. However, this is usually not affordable for very small companies and large organizations are usually better of absorbing the risk themselves and not paying the insurer a premium.

Sounds like it's pretty similar across Europe then (My Example was Sweden). 6 weeks I suppose can be pretty expensive small business compared to the 13 days here. But both systems are clearly tailored towards being friendly to employees rather than employers, which is (as usual) the difference to the US.

This. I also like to point out that Germany doesn't exactly have a concept of "paid sick days".

The exact details are complicated but from the employees point of view the gist is that as long as you are not chronically ill (or try to game the system) you don't have to worry about days. Just inform your employer on the first day and get a doctor's note after the third.

Sick time and holiday time are very different things. Holidays are mandatory and can't be reduced by sick time.

I never understood the concept of paid sick days as it is used in the US. From what I heard you have a fixed number and you don't have to prove that you are sick to use them. So what is the difference between paid sick days and holidays exactly?

LOL. Disgusting. They turn it from "sickness" to "preventing injury".

In Australia it's called personal leave (though many bosses don't) because it covers not just you being sick but also family being sick.

I take sick leave liberally. I suffer depression and don't go to work. Sick leave is calculated as part of the salary, just like holiday.

The result is probably that people who actually give a damn about their coworkers work, even when they are sick, and the people who don't call in sick when they aren't.

I have told sick colleagues before who have come in that they are doing more damage than good. That turning up in their condition, infecting everyone else, is a net drag. That they will take longer to get better and will produce lower quality work while they are sick, and they will infecting others, causing even more damage.

If they really cared about their coworkers, they would stay home and get better. If they care about being seen to be at work (for whatever reason - maybe they have a toxic culture of presenteeism) over their coworkers, they'll come in.

Of course, if the cost of staying home is that everyone loses a bonus, we can come to some arrangement. I would be happy for my sick colleague to take it easy and just mark time while the rest of us covered their work for the day, and I'm sure we can send them off "to gather supplies" or some such if we need to. You get what you incentivise; you incentivise employees to come in when they're sick, that's all you'll get.

Yes, this is what I never get about incentives like that: why on earth would you want to incentivise your employees to come to work sick?

A constantly sneezing worker will be unprofessional, prone to making errors, much less productive and endanger his/her co-workers. Now, granted, this is Amazon so no client will see those warehouse employees and I guess their processes are so airtight that one employee making mistakes won't have such a big impact (four-eyes principles or whatever). But it still seems pretty inefficient to me.

In Switzerland, some companies have insurance that covers sick days for employees - if your employee is sick, the insurance company will pay the wage during that time. This is mainly meant to cover longer sicknesses in smaller companies, who otherwise might get into real financial issues, but it also has the (in my opinion) desirable side-effect that a company is actually better off sending you home than having you at your desk as a half-productive zombie.

People who actually give a damn about their co-workers might work from home but they wouldn't go to the office and pass their disease on to half a dozen others.

That is one less generous interpretation of the policy. However, knowing Amazon are fairly big proponents of Lean/Kanban/Systems Thinking, I suspect the intent is actually a different one.

The alternative interpretation would be: Amazon is using peer pressure to make German workers call in sick.

Any group who actually thinks about it would quickly realise that 1 person off for 2 weeks with the flu is better than 10 people off for 2 days each with the flu.

You're ignoring two things: 1. People's selfishness and 2. People of older age

> Any group who actually thinks about it would quickly realise that 1 person off for 2 weeks with the flu is better than 10 people off for 2 days each with the flu.

People tend to not think that way. It'll not be "luckily David stayed home so we don't get sick" but "David stayed home again and we didn't meet the requirements, screw you David!"

Older people ("older" as in 45+) are more often sick due to age related problems like back pain, knee problems, etc. Having those people on your team means that you are disadvantaged in comparison to other teams that don't have so many older people. People notice those things and will try to get rid of the older people to get their cut. To the company the experience of older people matters but their colleagues only see their bonuses disappear. This creates hostility between age groups and (imho) leads to ageism.

This is plain disgusting. My wifes employer (not Amazon) has a similar concept to reward bonuses for teams and this causes a lot of mobbing against her and her colleague (also mother). The reason less bonus got paid out were sick leaves, well they don't call it that way, but it boils down to that.

Reason for her/our sick leaves are not that we are sick, but kids < 4 years are just more often sick when going through all the various childhood diseases. Kindergarten will phone you and you have to pick up your sick kid within an hour. Then one of us has to stay at home and watch the sick kid until the doctor says it's ok to put them back in kindergarten.

Most people I know here, abuse the rule with the 2 sick days ( making extended weekend e.g. ), but there's something more though.

I don't see what's wrong with people skipping work from once in a while, so even abusing the rule is not such a big deal ( IMHO ).

Maybe as a capitalist country, if amazon needs dedicated people they can easily increase the pay-rate, which is low anyway, to the point that people will care more about being at work, than being "sick".

Or deploy robots who do not get sick, only break sometimes.

Really, German labour law is okay. Maybe Amazon should play by the rules or unknowingly encourage sick workers to sneeze on their peers.

What would increasing the pay-rate change? Being sick would also pay more.

That's not the issue. When you are paid peanuts, you stop caring about the work.

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