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?

NHS queues? Disability?
I’ve been waiting over 18 months for an operation, my sickness is awful
absolutely nothing I can do about it
and if they’re messing with PIP and wanting disabled people to work more then there is going to be more sickness

I work in that industry. We book months ahead especially for loan cars, I would say it’s 8 weeks notice if you need a car if not more
but we ring customers to tell them their service is due, they all say oh not yet, I’ll book it in closer to the time, and then complain we can’t get them in (I do tell them to book now…)

Can you blame them for putting themselves first. The industry I am in has just made a lot of redundancies, many of them the 'go above and beyond' types. We're just numbers in the end.
There's a saying, put your own life jacket on first.
I will always put my health and my family above an employer, but I will do my job well when I can.

No loan car needed , but its a real shame young people coming out of school / college don't want to take up a career in this .
He takes someone on and all they do is to stand outside on their phone or won't work the extra 30 minutes to get the job finished .

Never heard of this except for UTI

I mean, pharmacists would be absolutely booked up with that all day. Do you live in the UK?

One poster mentioned her group in their late 60s - I don't expect anyone to be working in their late 60s so I don't know how much that factors into workforce planning.

A couple of posters have mentioned the economically inactive over 50s who are relying on savings till pension age comes, and not claiming benefits. This is one thing I mentioned in 2020 on here and I was told the numbers were too small for anybody to care.

I'm not criticising any of those people. I hope to be one! I just thought it needed a bit of planning from a workforce perspective. Because I thought it was screamingly obvious that such people would stop working as soon as possible in 2019.. and then lockdowns etc broke the social contract so I think a chunk of those people who were considering staying in work decided not to.

I think it came up on here just as I attended an event about it. I'm not in that age group even now but it was interesting to attend- I knew the organiser.

The chair was bonkers and basically just shouted a lot about how everyone has a moral obligation to work if they can. Didn't listen to any ideas about how to keep that group in work.

But when I mentioned it on here, I did say it's probably more common amongst people without children and I certainly got told off here because apparently being child free and able to retire after 50 is a tiny and a irrelevant number of people. I don't know what the statistics are myself.

There will of course be others who do have children - but can afford it because they saved a chunk of their big salaries or they inherited etc etc.

I do wonder if any organisations or any government factors that in. Whenever you read any finance journalism, it always tells you that you need X amount of money in retirement and bases it on things like regular meals out on holidays. Anyone who subscribes to a FIRE kind of mentality is likely to be sacrificing those things in the first place. I'm not gonna go after them when I retire. I remember David Cameron asking us to go out and spend for the good of the economy. Nope. Why would I buy things I don't need? Sorry, I digress.

As others have said, I think in many cases it’s down to cost cutting, budgetary constraints and long term underinvestment!

Much of this isn’t new, for years you’ve had to sit on phone calls to companies or organisations, waiting to talk to someone, whilst being told they’re experiencing ‘exceptionally high call volumes’ and that ‘your call is important’. None of that is new, has been the case for years! Unless of course you’re looking to buy something or cancel a membership and then they seem to be able to fast track their call handling. 🙄😵‍💫

i work for a council, and our team has been whittled down and whittled down over many years. In our wider workforce, two of our assistant directors have recently left, and their workloads have been added to another AD’s. And these are staff with big, specialist jobs and loads of people to look after. So it’s no wonder services are shot and waiting times are long. People have masses to do and are under often unrelenting pressure.

finally, i do think as well that people are maybe less willing to battle on and come into work when they’re ill, which sometimes was the case pre COVID. And that’s not a bad thing; people spreading illness around an office isn’t something to be celebrated.

Likely.
Number of economically inactive people due to long-term sickness in the United Kingdom from 1st quarter 2000 to 1st quarter 2025.

At the beginning of 2020, the number was the same as 2010. You can see what's happened since then.

Also possible that the dip between 2009 to 2019 reflects better population health before Conservative cuts to services (2010 onwards) really kicked in, but I have insufficient data to examine that.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388245/uk-sick-leave-figures

I probably gave a bad example, but DH had a UTI a few months ago. You apparently need to see a GP for treatment for UTIs in men. It was impossible to get in with our GP in a meaningful time frame so ended up getting treatment from my private medical insurance - but not everyone has that option.

Having just checked, a pharmacist can’t deal with a chest infection either - there are seven specific illnesses they can prescribe antibiotics for. Anything else and you need a GP.

I’ve just been signed off sick. I’ve been working 60 hour weeks (paid for 35 hours) alongside my team, yet getting constantly berated for not meeting deadlines or doing work quickly enough. As a result everyone is on the edge and showing signs of stress. The bosses view is that we are lazy. I often see managers on here who also treat their staff with contempt. If you want low sickness first step is to treat employees like human beings.

I have the ultimate unskilled job - I stack shelves in a supermarket overnight. I don't think people may realise we have targets and our speed etc is closely monitored. I am not fast enough and it's an utterly soul-destroying experience, and it really affects my mental health. I had a breakdown last year and was signed off for 2 months (burnt out from 4 autistic kids plus the job).

We're also chronically understaffed and there's usually one colleague signed off for 1 month plus. Usually because of health issues caused by the work (knees/back/shoulders). There's no light duties alternative, so there's no choice but to get signed off.

@Tanyasfootspa

well if you'd just reverse the negative impact my strokes have had on me I'd happily go back to going to work 'rain or shine' as I did for over 35 years.

🙄🙄🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️

I was talking to my DP about the amount of people in our street that aren't working just this lunchtime. Granted most of our neighbours are over 50 but very few work. It seems most have left full time jobs now and are semi retired. I do also worry about the number of NEETs aged 16 - 24 (not in education, employment or training) - I think there's about 900k nationally now. So it seems the workforce is shrinking - losing the oldest and youngest members. I can remember my organisation taking on a batch of school leavers every year, as can my DP who worked in the car industry. It seems very few organisations do this now, my DS ending up being taken on by a big employer after several agency jobs.

Been off 3 months with cancer. Chemo is kicking my ass, cancer is stubborn and growing. I just finished 4 days of V&D. My mouth is ulcerated, my hair gone, fatigue like no other, appointments that I can’t keep
up with and my hospital, an hour away on a busy motorway.

What do you want me to do OP? I want to return to my job, but can’t in this state. All my life, I’ve looked after my body, avoided alcohol and processed foods. This is how I’m repayed. It suck’s. People are falling ill.

I would say a lot of these issues have nothing to do with people being off work but more that these services are run by people who cannot manage these services in general.

People should stay at home when they're ill. Obviously depending on what it is. A few sniffles shouldn't have you ringing in sick for the most part but wfh if you can.

Germs spread.

Underfunded NHS has knock-on effects across multiple workplaces. Can't get an appointment after 5pm? Well guess you'll have to take a day off so you can attend the GP. But can you afford that? Probably not if you're low income. So that troubling symptom gets ignored for years until you're in the back of an ambulance.

I worked in the NHS for 13 years on hospital wards as a HCA.

I was allowed 2 episodes of sickness per year before getting a disciplinary. Do you think I dragged myself in to look after vulnerable patients despite suffering from a cold/flu? Yep, I did. And management were okay with that. Because if I didn't turn up I'd end up having a stage 1 warning and I needed that job.

Not only that, but the staffing was the bare minimum. No one extra booked on incase someone was sick. So if I rang in, I know I'd be leaving the ward short staffed. And I know when it happened to me, that patient care was definitely compromised.

So no, we aren't lazy. We just wanted you all to stop voting for austerity for so long.

It may be unskilled but it is a necessary job. Always put yourself first. I would always take my health over any job.

That graph is designed to look scary but the actual graph only shows an increase of like around 20% in the last few years?

@Enigma53 I’m so very sorry - my sons partner was off for10 months(NHS but not frontline medical) with stage 3 breast cancer in her late 30s - there is no way given the amount of intensive various differing treatments and appointments and debilitation could she have worked - has a toddler too - she is now back at work -

It’s disgusting how this is allowed to happen. Nurse here and we are told to just wear a mask. I think if the public actually knew how many vulnerable patients die due to infections from members of staff they would be an outcry.

The consequence of 40 years of privatisation, neo-liberal policies and deregulation under Thacher, combined with 15 years (and counting) of austerity under sucessive governments.

Transference of wealth from the working class to the establishment and capitalist elites of millions of pounds a day results in broken structural services, misery and illness.

The royal family has been given its third increase in money from the public purse since Covid while ordinary people are made to struggle on in exploitative and humiliating circumstances. All while feeling they’re drowning as a response to their own choices. Bring on the revolution!

people are accommodated if they have been ill -come back on part time/ limited hours/ can’t do long shifts/ can’t do nights etcetc
Means the burden lands on remaining staff plus if they are public servants our tax is paying a full wage for less than full work.
Its the employment laws but no Gov would dare change them.

They get paid to be off.

My husband's company won't even pay you if you have a day off with the runs - it's zero pay from day 1 and it's not some zero hours thing, this is an office workplace with "professionals" working there.

I work in the NHS and people are signed off constantly - it's almost a joke now about who's turn it is next to have a month or 2 off. IMO it's too easy to get signed off in the public sector and has no financial implications so people will not think twice about doing it

Where I work they have cut costs so hard and so far, we all have to work like the clappers with barely a moment to breathe all shift. If you’re not 100%, you’re better to call in sick than have demands made of why your targets weren’t met. But we’re so short staffed all the time (turnover is high) that if you call in sick then stuff just…doesn’t get done.

i used to have your attitude. I do still go all the time I reasonably can. But work-caused RSI and mental load mean sometimes I have to prioritise myself. I’m no longer willing to suffer damage to myself to make a (poor) living.