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

[Tanyasfootspa]

Posting here out of sheer frustration really. Is it just me or does it feel like everything is grinding to a halt because half the workforce is off sick.

I’ve had three appointments cancelled this week alone — GP, dentist, and my son’s speech therapy. All due to staff absences. Tried to phone the council about a bins issue (don’t even get me started) and was on hold for 47 minutes before being cut off.

Meanwhile, I go to work, rain or shine. Loads of my colleagues are off with colds, stress, or just “taking a mental health day.” I’m not doubting genuine illness, but surely there’s a tipping point where too many people being off means things just don’t function?

Schools are short-staffed, NHS is beyond crisis, trains are delayed, post is late. It’s not just inconvenience — this feels like serious breakdown of basic services.

AIBU to think the UK is being held together by a rapidly shrinking group of people who are actually showing up?

Something’s clearly not working. It feels like there’s no backup anymore. No resilience. Just everything falling to pieces when someone sneezes or feels stressed.

Anyone else noticing this or am I being unfair?

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.

I wonder why that is🙄

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.......

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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Agree with the other points made. There are a lot of demands placed on the existing workforce- because we’re still quite reliant on people doing things, rather than computers, many work interactions still need a person to review things. Because there are fewer people working, the ones still in post have to pick up the slack. I think the pandemic made people less loyal to their employers, and more likely to call in sick than struggle in coughing and spluttering as they’d have done in the past. If I didn’t have the wfh option I’d probably call in sick more, I don’t get any recognition for only having a handful of sick days over my whole career.

Your ire is directed in the wrong place. Companies have slashed the workforce but not the shareholders bonuses. Pretty much every place you go in now you'll see minimum staff members, and the ones that are there are doing their best in difficult circumstances.

And they're being told to be grateful to have a job. Not that this job is really enough to pay the bills or rent or heaven forbid buy a house on, no but they should count themselves lucky they are in work.

And of course we can't hire the people we need from abroad, because we decided we didn't want their help. We'd train up our own. Except we don't. So there's nobody there.

The country is being run by the bare bones of a workforce and it's not illness that's causing the issues it's just systemic.

Why employ a person when you can use AI? Except the AI turns out to be not so intelligent. The more AI gets inserted into things the worse it seems to become. Because again, it's all done on the cheap with cost put above customer satisfaction.

The whole system needs a fucking shake up from the top down

I absolutely agree with your post. Spot on.

a lot of this really is illness.
there’s a lot more about since Covid.

Assumption much!

Presumably you had to take time off work for being sick if you needed the GP? You can't really complain about health professionals being off sick when you're off sick yourself to see them. They come into contact with loads of germs and stuff every day so no surprise they get unwell sometimes.

Chronic, long-term underfunding causing services to be running on a skeleton staff on a permanent basis is causing the country to fall apart.

Well, AI will take over a lot of jobs soon.

I definitely think companies and public services are operating on minimum numbers in a lot of case - sometimes due to necessity , sometimes through pure greed as some management consultant has said ‘this job only takes 1 person’ - what it has done has left very little slack in the system when people are sick or on holiday - a lot of jobs have changed too beyond all recognition and not for the better - and many people are more prone to think ‘fuck it’ if they feel a bit under the weather too - it’s mix I think of all these factors

A lot of the 1,000,000 are economically inactive people in their 50s and early 60s who've decided that they can manage without a job and have enough savings to tide themselves over until a pension kicks in. (I'm not talking about those who have nice pensions and retire at 55 or whatever.)

Jeremy Hunt went on and on about these people and the harm they're doing.

I say who can blame them.

So do I. We didn't have this problem a few decades ago when one wave was enough to support the family. So house prices will have some implication on work/life balance People are burnt out now, having little to no life/work balance.

Nope I’d consider it to be years and years of underfunding public services, mis management of the NHS, over working people, high cost of living and low rate of upward social mobility causing workers to feel completely depleted.

I work in public services and yes there is overspending in some areas, but what the human workforce is expected to do in other areas is complete madness. They make whole teams redundant and expect others just pick up the task and work themselves ill.

Urgh I had a boss who came to work “come rain or shine” like you. It was fucking annoying. He turned up late one day because he’d had to keep pulling his car over to throw up from a bug.

@Tanyasfootspa to reiterate, you are missing the point when you ask "where is the workforce is going to come from?"

A lot of of these organisations are not hiring sufficient staff. There isn't a question about where the workforce is going to come from because they're not hiring.

Add in the overreliance on technology. Add in the bloated bonuses etc that people at the top of being paid. I mean Thames water should really have been nationalised by now but the directors are still getting bonuses - and you have a perfect storm of discontent. So in that situation, people will do the bare minimum as well. And it's struggle for them to do the bare minimum in some cases.

Companies decide to manage on fewer essential staff. The staff who are there then can't cope with the workload.

I'm generally not in favour of too much government interference. But I have wished (for quite some time now) the government could at least encourage a mentality where more foot soldiers are hired. It's absolutely ridiculous to try and run any organisation with all the money going to the people at the top and not enough staff doing the ground work.

It goes back a long way. If anyone remembers the fiasco of luggage when terminal five opened at Heathrow, many of the relevant staff said that the planned system was unworkable and they were ignored - until the terminal opened and the chaos ensued.

My last boyfriend mostly grew up abroad and used to tell me how much better things were in other countries. This was a couple of years ago. (I don't have a lot of experience of any other country except the USA). When we were dating, I thought he was just moaning. Now I wonder if he's actually right. I do feel like things are in a real state. Maybe it's as bad in other countries. I have no way of knowing.

Things that were totally predictable post lockdown seem to have come as a surprise for some businesses. And they're not willing to adjust their models. In the past, I would look to the CBI as one organisation that can influence businesses - and look at the state of that! Nearly closed down.

Public services certainly seem heavily focused on what AI can do for them in terms of replacing staff. I would say a lot of organisations aren't really thinking about staffing issues at all.

it's a total mess.

We have long hours & long commutes in this country plus work is generally more intensive vs my parents day so I think increased sickness is to be expected.