The 48 hour D&V 'rule' and sick pay

[EdSheeran]

We get no pay for the first 2 days of each epidose and then SSP, so it's not surprising that many people don't remain off work.

As an immunocompromised person, I do get pissed off with people who've recently had D&V (or even worse, still ill!) come into the office.

I feel like there should be some sort of compromise e.g. working from home. The majority of us are flexi workers with laptops and remote access.

AIBU?

In an ideal world people would get paid. unfortunatley many comoanies look at one day absences as suspicious, D&V being a common reason for illness so maybe your company has bought in the 48 hour rule as a way to cut down on those days taken by people who aren't really ill. Sadly it punishes the ones who really are poorly but it will also make others think twice about loosing two days pay. In the past I've worked with people who would take odd days sickness so not to use up holiday doing things like having furniture delivered or waiting for workmen etc. I also now work with a lovely lady who is pressured by her DD who is a single mum to look after her GD if she is off school, sickness, training days etc. Our employer is far more lenient than her DD employer so in a strange twist we end up picking up the slack due to someone who doesn't work at our place

I'm not paid for time off, so I go in, I'd love to take 2 days off after an illness but 3-4 days unpaid is not financially viable.

At my work, typical meeting would go:

Manager: you've had x days & x instances off in the last 12 months. This takes your sickness level over x which is the trigger point so we have to initiate capability procedures*. Do you understand?
Employee: yes.
Manager: are there any mitigating circumstances, such as disability or pregnancy?
Employee answers.
Manager can then make allowance if 'appropriate'.

That's basically it. We would be advised on every prior occasion of sickness that our level was x & what would happen if it reached the trigger point. There is no allowance made for accident or chronic/serious illness unless they constitute formal disability. I think there is some allowance made for things like cancer where you have to go for treatment etc but it has to be negotiated basically.

*capability procedure amounts to a first stage disciplinary. We get 3 & then the sack.

Years ago I was working for a horrendous employer who used the Bradford method, so the trigger point for a disciplinary (and they never took mitigating factors into account, it was an automatic disciplinary) could be very low. Anyway, there was a bit of a media storm about SARS, if anyone remembers that, and anyone who was returning from travel from the far or middle east was forbidden from HR from attending work, and was instructed they must stay at home for four weeks. Then a few months later they disciplined anyone who was affected for having an unsatisfactory attendance record. Even though none of them had actually been ill and had only taken the time off because the company insisted. Thankfully it was also an employer that recognised a union, so the union negotiated on the employees behalfs. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that HR policies wrt to illness are often shockingly unfair to people who are genuinely ill, so sadly I can well understand why people feel obliged to come to work even when ill.

I think this is a really awful policy that so many companies use. It puts employees in a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation'.

My DH was working as a chef in a pub which is part of a very successful chain. He had frequent diarrhoea and stomach cramps one morning, so phoned his boss to say he was unable to work. His boss told him to 'take some immodium and come in'. As a fresh food handler . This man didn't care about the well being of his paying customers, let alone his staff. DH refused to go in, and got treated like crap for it, not in any official sense but got given all the lousy shifts and was generally ignored at work for about a week when he went back.

He has had a career change now and is working in a local school. A week and a half after he started DD got ill and needed a few days in hospital. They were amazing about it all and gave the time off he needed, and let him make up the hours elsewhere.

As a contract worker I get no pay when sick. I take as little time off as possible when ill. I'm lucky that I rarely get D&V, most of my illness is down to colds and I tend to solider on. I am respectful enough to keep antibacterial hand gel at my desk and make sure I wipe down my desk, keyboard and phone at the end of my shift so the next person on my computer doesn't catch my germs.

My last workplace had an expectation you came into work regardless of how sick you were. I did get really annoyed when back in 2009 when a girl in my workplace came in knowing she had the 'bird flu' strain - I was pregnant at the time, as where 2 others on my floor. I did have a bit of a wobble at the time as the news was rife with the story of the pregnant woman who was seriously ill hospital with it.

I always made the effort to come back to work as soon as I was well enough to be there rather than wait until I was 100% better due to not getting paid and absences being frowned upon. A colleague of mine used to take the piss with quite a lot of things and would always take a full week off, making sure she was back before the self certification stopped. It didn't stop her going out which she would post about on Facebook and tell us about when she came back to work though. When it came to redundancies, we were all scored on various things including sickness. I wasn't happy when they said they would only count absences of less than a week as they considered a week or more as genuine. She had no countable sickness because of this despite her having lots more days off sick than I did.

There's some bad employers out there. We use a variation of the Bradford rule but we apply sense to it so e.g. if a good employee has had a longish period of sickness and then 5 months later is off because of a cold we'd apply manager discretion and ignore the trigger.

Shocked reading the Bradford Formula that it includes emergency childcare, if someone needs to take a day's annual leave (to look after their kids) I don't see why that is a disciplinary issue. Feels like discrimination since it is so often mothers rather than fathers that take time off to look after sick children.

It can be useful for identifying people who are unhappy in their work but it needs a good manager to turn around performance. People can get into a downward cycle and so it is better to address these issues sooner rather than later but I'm not convinced that entering disciplinary proceedings is the way to go, often a change of role can make a big difference.

In my younger years I worked temp jobs which had no sick pay. Taking a day off sick was literally the difference between whether I ate the following week or not, things were that tight financially. Now I get paid sick days, so staying home is not such an issue if I'm genuinely ill.

Don't blame people, blame the employers who don't make appropriate allowances for genuine sickness.