It’s written for the shareholder/executive class, so certain assumptions about traditional capitalism were always baked in. The Bancrofts knew the Libertarian nonsense was off-putting enough to serious readers of the “news you can use” that it was best confined to the op-ed pages. Either as an informal condition of sale and/or an understanding of this reality, Rupert Murdoch continued this for the most part. That the loony tunes op-ed view is now leaking so obviously into straight reportage indicates to me that Lachlan is being allowed to make more decisions.
8 Likes
Depending on the disability coverage terms, it might require that a week of sick leave (not PTO) be used prior to disability kicking in. That was the case for me a couple decades ago when I had a severe illness and was on the cusp of using short-term disability. They might have been trying to make you ineligible for coverage.
9 Likes
Not only that, but when sick workers show up to work, they often get other workers sick. How often does a flu tear through an office? Regularly. Because one employee shows up sick and gets five others sick. Two of those employees decide they can’t afford to take a sick day and get ten others sick. It’s a pandemic in microcosm.
Really, employees should have unlimited sick days.
16 Likes
It’s said that this is also why the news reporting in the WSJ is/was reliable. The readers want real news because real money (theirs) is at stake.
5 Likes
… I’m sure 92 year old Rupert Murdoch puts in a full day at the WSJ’s parent company every day even if he’s not feeling it, and the board writes him up if he’s not productive enough 
9 Likes
In addition to that, if an increase in sick leave of a most a couple of days per worker is costing you >10% of hourly worker time, that means unexpected absences are forcing you to shut other things down, or something? Which of course means you were running too lean and didn’t have enough staff. Hire more people, do more automation, or train people to be more flexible so you can shuffle them around to deal with people who are out, and quit complaining about people not working when sick.
6 Likes
Workers are feeling too unwell to work, more often than pre-Covid.
It must be that the Younger Generation are all fragile snowflakes.
1 Like
5 Likes
8 Likes
Once again goes back to ineffective management. If you aren’t running your department, team, business efficiently enough to cover someone’s sick days, it’s management’s fault, not the poor worker who’s scraping by. Cross-training, substitutions, people willing to fill in are all alternatives to beating employees over the head with “think of your team”, “how will they manage without you” and my most hated response, “it is what it is”.
9 Likes
This attitude, or the attitude a lot of American workers had pre-COVID, starts getting baked into people in school. I can remember my schools giving awards to students every year who had perfect attendance. Getting sick and missing school did count against you, so they were incentivizing us to go to school sick. And it worked on me. I used to be one of those people who would go to work no matter what, unless I literally couldn’t physically get out of bed. And I wasn’t alone. And I’m sure this attitude is a part of the reason why COVID spread like wildfire in the US. A lot of people learned from this. Unfortunately, it’s clear that corporate America learned nothing. They should view employees using their sick days as an insurance policy protecting them against the next pandemic.
I want to change the narrative completely. The last time I checked, my brain is part of my physical body. It’s not just connected to it. It’s literally a part of my body. Mental health is physical health. It’s just telling you what part of the body you’re talking about. It’s not any different than talking about cardiac health, or GI health, or bone health. I want everyone to start thinking of mental health as a subset of physical health, not a separate thing.
“But if we do that, some people will take advantage of it and call in sick when they really aren’t sick!” /s (this is probably actually true, but most people won’t and it’s a cheap price to pay to keep your workforce healthier and happier)
12 Likes
One of my last formal performance reviews gave me a score of 3 out of 5 on attendance. I had a perfect record-I was late less than 30 minutes for the whole period and was never absent when scheduled. When asked why I only had a score that meant “filled basic expectations” I was told that no one could get more than a 3 on attendance because it was expected that you would never miss any time.
7 Likes
it lost 10.9% of hourly worker time in 2022 because of unplanned absenteeism.
It may be unscheduled, but it was NOT unplanned. It was already accrued on their books, FFS!
9 Likes
Yeah - the USian idea of ‘sick days’ is just fucking dumb. Basically it’s holiday, but if you are sick you have to be sick on your own time (your holiday time allowance) but not the company’s.
And welcome! 
12 Likes
I’ve been fortunate to work at very few jobs that had a traditional corporate overhead, but when I have, I can’t recall any c-suite goons contributing anything but impeding the line workers with idiotic mandates that fit some temporary agenda cooked up by the CEO. They did spend a heck of a lot of time at lunch and “meetings” outside the office, though. Coincidentally, those were always the most productive periods.
10 Likes
As a Scot, the very idea that you have an allotted number of sick days is quite bizarre. Who can predict if they’ll be sick and for how long? In the Socialist hellscape that is the UK, you can have as many sick days (at full pay in the vast majority of cases) throughout the year as you need. If you’re sick for more than 7 days in a row you need to provide a doctor’s note, at which point you may be put on Statutory Sick Pay (a kind of minimum wage) if the employer wants to.
12 Likes
It’s not a schedule. It’s like, “here’s how many days you can call in without penalty and still get paid”.
4 Likes
Unpaid PTO has to be carried as a liability while unpaid sick time doesn’t, so they’re trying to reduce their unpaid PTO.
As a non-American and general fan of not striving towards the most oppressive dystopia possible, it’s heartening to see US workers recently starting to ever so slightly wake the **** up about the absurd and abusive norms and overall work culture that seems to have been dominant there. This? Great. The ongoing unionization boom? Even better. Major, high-visibility unions going on long-lasting strikes and not backing down? Better again. I’ve been baffled for essentially my entire conscious life by how Americans have seemed to take pride in going to work sick, or consciously not using things like vacation days - it’s such an absurd set of ideas. It essentially amounts to self-flagellation in service of capitalism - consciously denying yourself benefits that you have the right to, and even actively harming yourself, in order to appease some absurd ideal of “hard work” and “productivity”. Fingers crossed this actually leads to lasting culture changes that might in time trickle into policies that actually help take care of people? Would be nice.
There are definitely issues with the Norwegian healthcare and benefits systems, but compared to the US it’s absurdly generous. Everyone gets 21 paid vacation days a year, with government employees (and many other companies) giving 25. We can self-report as sick for 3 days at a time without a doctor’s note 4 times a year - anything beyond that requires a doctor being involved, but is practically unlimited. And nobody in their right mind would blame you for not coming in if you’re sick. There are asshole bosses, obviously, but they tend to stand out.
Sick leave beyond 16 days is also paid by the government rather than by buisnesses, which obviously makes this a lot easier for companies to live with. You get your full wages covered for as long as you’re on regular sick leave, but there’s a max limit of a year for that - if you’re sick for more than a year, you transition to other benefits which typically entail a ~33% pay cut - and at that point you mostly transition out of being employed and into some kind of work rehabilitation programme (or at least that’s the intention - as I said, there are issues) or long-term benefits for those who have health issues rendering them permanently unable to work. That pay cut absolutely sucks for people struggling to get by while ill, but at least the vast majority of healthcare here is either free or very cheap. It’s a system with a lot of flaws, most notably it being entrenched in toxic neoliberal ideology and New Public Management thinking, but at least the foundational idea is that people struggling need help.
As someone who has been through enough medical stuff over the past half-decade or so that I’d be dead or dying and simultaneously either bankrupt or crushed by debt if I lived in the US, I have to say that I really, truly hope the US labor movement is able to get it’s act together and stomp some coprorate faces in the coming years. It is so, so desperately needed.
14 Likes
They want you to use PTO because they are required to eventually pay that out, while unused sick days can often be unpaid.
3 Likes
