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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

> It's a problem everywhere. Sick leave is something you take when you have high fever or need surgery, not when you start coughing

Do you be any experience outside the USA? Your description doesn't fit my experience in the UK and Denmark, or my general understanding of the rest of Europe.

Europe will need to consider smaller changes — there are more gig economy workers than ever before, different countries have taken different approaches to closing schools etc — but I think the fundamentals are OK.

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I'm in Poland. We have free public healthcare and all the other nice employee privileges Europe boasts about. On paper.

In practice, most of those are guaranteed when your contract is the regular full-time one. Which is minority of jobs in Poland. To avoid paying taxes, most employers strive to employ their workers via contracts meant for part-time or gig work, or through B2B (thus we have lots of sole proprietorships "entrepreneurs" in the country). Most protections don't kick in there.

On top of that, getting a doctor's note for a runny nose is too much of a hassle, and nobody realistically does that.

Thirdly, regardless of how much worker protection your country has, day to day nobody wants to be seen as the panicky outlier at work. That's a self-limiting move, both career-wise and socially. This normalizes coming to work with potentially infectious diseases.

> To avoid paying taxes, most employers strive to employ their workers via contracts meant for part-time or gig work, or through B2B (thus we have lots of sole proprietorships "entrepreneurs" in the country). Most protections don't kick in there.

I know that this "loop hole" exists where I live too, but AFAIK it's either used by very small companies, which can fly "under the radar" or it's not done at all, because inspecting agencies will quickly stop this.

Where I live if you work for employer like a full-time long-term employee - you are full-time long-term employee, and cannot work as a "freelancer"/sole proprietor-contractor (I do not know exact terms in English, but I think we'll understand each other). Work inspection will check this employer rather soon. Usually, because competitor or some employee will make an anonymous report.

If you agree to work on this loop hole - then it's your problem - work as a full time employee, or charge enough to compensate yourself for possible downtime during illness.

Big enterprises definitely do not use this kind of loop hole.

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