AIBU to think too many people being off work is causing the country to fall apart?

This

It's both. The UK workforce has shrunk. I agree there are also some underemployed people and some organisations who choose not to recruit, but there are also whole sectors where they struggle to fill roles. People wanting more hours and not being able to get them is simply not an issue in some jobs.

I feel like the rise of business reliance on digital tech has something to do with it too. Companies employ less staff who spend increasing time ironing out digital problems, customers get frustrated when things don't work as well, employees end up stressed dealing with it all and have less of a team to fall back on - who would provide community and resilience. And if you're being paid a pittance and not much better off than on benefits, it's understandable to think 'why bother'. And of course, the customer ends up losing out. It feels as though some basic social fabric is disintegrating.

I work in the NHS, and things are being cut left right and centre, we are being constantly asked to find new ways of working more efficiently (constant since I started years ago), not replacing staff, offering less services so you feel shit about the work you can actually do, then continued scrutiny and pressure to do more with less. Half my team are off sick, and probably most are long term stress along with other genuine illnesses which I don't doubt are linked to the state of the workplace right now. The ones left then also get stressed and overworked and burnt out trying to carry the workload left by the others.

I agree, it's bad. But what can you do? Our trust alone has had to make over £15million savings this year and more to come. Yet demand for services is growing and staff is being cut.

Sorry to come and moan on your thread haha

Why do you need a GP appointment at all? Tch, no resilience. Stop bothering the doctors with your made up problems maybe. Dentist? Erm, resilience. Just deal with it, go to work. Waste of time going to the dentist when you could be working.

Tell your son to be more resilient too instead of jumping on the band wagon trend of having "issues". Speech therapy, what nonsense. In my day kids were expected to be quiet anyways, and learnt to speak at the threat of a cane! If they didn't, then that's their problem. No resilience.

There has to be a line and you've definitely crossed it with all these "problems" you and your family are having, to need all these silly appointments.

It's not that the workers aren't there @Tanyasfootspa - it's that the organisations aren't hiring them. Everyone is trying to do more with less. Where a company would have had a team of 4 they're now expecting one member of staff to do it. This has a knock-on effect that there are fewer jobs advertised. I'm self-employed and have been trying to get back into a salaried post for over a year with no luck and the number of advertised vacancies is about 30% of what it's been previously. The number of unemployed people masks a huge number of "underemployed" people who are like me, or who have a job but would like more hours or shifts etc.

These places don't hire enough staff from the get go, then make budget cuts including redundancy then are surprised when skeleton staff are expected to do 3 people's work each and end up off sick?

All by design.

The social contract is broken. People don’t feel loyalty any more as they can’t get ahead whatever they do. The rich get richer and the young people can’t afford a decent life. Work often pays no more than benefits.
Plus all the other stuff about businesses cutting staff to the minimum - zero hours contracts etc. Either to keep the bosses rich or to compete against companies (eg Amazon) that make it impossible to survive without being equally efficient.

What you are describing is backed up by the productivity stats. Public sector workforce is ballooning but each worker is doing less and less because they are off sick or working by the pool in Spain or having a mental health day.......

I wonder why that is🙄

It’s really hard to fire someone in the public sector. Your job is safer even when taking lots of sick time. In the private sector, they’d be managed out.

There just isn't staff to cover absences. GP absence may not be about resisilience, but patient safety.
I work in a hospital. When I started we used to hire summer employees to cover absences. This is how most of us got our firat jobs. Now we just manage with skeleton crew or close the ward for a few weeks. There are few functions where there is nobody to cover and there is no money to bring someone in for the day/week.

Businesses used to build in sickness when hiring and deciding on necessary staff numbers. Now, they don’t. There are also fewer staff overall, nevermind the sickness absences. Maybe 15 years ago, you’d have 3 people on one workload but now you’ve only got one person on it. That’s how it is, spread across every level of business. So when that one person is off sick, the other staff simply cannot absorb the work as they’re already doing the job of 3 people.

It’s cost cutting. That also leads to higher sickness levels as people are exhausted and can’t push through as the day is too demanding.

Except that I’ve been there a few days a month for probably 6 months now (the cancer thing). It’s always the same staff working and there is always a “staff shortage”. I think they just won’t hire enough people to get the jobs done.

Retail pharmacy is also really struggling to fill posts at the moment too.

cpe.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Pharmacy-Pressures-Survey-2024-Staffing-and-Morale-Report-Final-Oct-2024.pdf

Honestly I think it's cost cutting by businesses and services. I'm a teacher and when anyone is off sick, school won't get supply in. You just have to make do. They get the TAs to cover classes and teachers just go without their TAs. It's really rubbish.

Well, I’ve been off for nearly a year with cancer, so I guess I’m part of the problem.

However, my guess is that a lot of this is trying to improve margins within organisations in tough economic times. Our local pharmacy (both of them actually) are always struggling due to “staff shortage”. Queues like 30 people long out the door into the street. It’s always “so sorry for the delay, we’re short on staff today!”

Except that I’ve been there a few days a month for probably 6 months now (the cancer thing). It’s always the same staff working and there is always a “staff shortage”. I think they just won’t hire enough people to get the jobs done.

Similarly, in my industry, yes, I’ve been off sick for a year (actually no longer ‘off sick’ as my job disappeared since I got cancer and now I’m just unemployed). But I regularly search for jobs thinking about when I no longer am too ill to work. Where previous 10-20 jobs might have come up in 50 mile radius, there are now 0. Wherever vacancies might be occurring, no one is looking to fill them anymore.

A lot of people are genuinely ill. I know people who have been horrendously affected by Covid, a couple of whom will probably never work again. Maybe try & show some empathy.

This is not news. Both the current and previous government have clearly stated that the number of people of working age that are not working due to ill health is not sustainable. The problem is, how do you distinguish between the genuinely ill and those that are taking the piss. And then how do we stop the spongers so that we can properly support those in genuine need? Nobody has come up with a solution yet!

Gee, it's almost as if a country with an ageing population and a shrinking workforce shouldn't have spent the past decade and a half voting for governments that refused to invest in the infrastructure needed to tackle, or at least mitigate, those problems, while also allowing wealth inequality to run rampant 🤷‍♀️

The UK workforce has shrunk. By over a million since 2020, according to the IES. This has had an impact on all kinds of services and sectors, meanwhile our demand for them hasn't correspondingly decreased. So you're right OP, in many cases the backup quite literally isn't there.

Everyone seems to be ill all the time. I’ve been ill since Easter and on antibiotics now. Luckily I work from home as would have definitely been too poorly to go in to the office some days. But I haven’t actually taken any time off, although my productivity probably hasn’t been great.

But I will probably have to take some time off sick in the future and my employer has made so many people redundant that if I do, there is no one at all the step in and take on my work. I don’t think they have even thought of this as I am very reliable.

I agree. Our local council has one social worker working in the Children with Disabilities team. She works 3 days a week. There used to be 4 of them working full time.

This. I once had a boss who was an “I never take a day off me” person. He came to the office for three days with a really heavy cold. Spent the whole time moaning about how ill he was, never did any work, coughed and sneezed all over the place.

Over the next week the two people who sat opposite him and the two who sat next to him came down with what he had. They took time off and he berated them for being weak and not being resilient, moaned about being short staffed.

I didn't realise the NHS ran the train service 😆

No, seriously though, underfunding is really the problem.
Staff cuts mean no one is there to cover in an absence. In all the national services.