I agree with you, some do abuse it. Although not all abuse. Do you have kids? I don't want to assume you do or don't have. But with young kids, they get sick easy multiple times a year they don't feel "well". Easily burn through those 6 days a year just on kids, assuming you can keep your own personal self healthy the the entire year.

I do not.

However at my previous employer the people with kids who used their sick days to take care of them or take the siblings etc. almost never made proper arrangements before hand. They would even admit to as much saying the kid got sick on Saturday, Monday morning rolls around and said individual isn’t there suddenly because they left it to the last minute to make arrangements and would be calling in at 830/9 to let us know

Not to say there aren’t unavoidable circumstances but again, these people barely tried to even give fair warning to their employer, they just use a sick day as a get off free day. Where as the people who were actually important to be there would always plan ahead and make arrangements.

Aren't employees entitled to 5 unpaid family days for the year?

I know for us, we get 6 sick days, 2 sick less a days (meaning you work part of your shift but book off the remaining which is unpaid) and 5 family days

I burn through the family days pretty quick because of my kids

Sometimes they hope the kid is good enough for school on Mon.

We've been burning lots of days because of a sick kid this year. RSV kicked his butt, and ours. Then he got something else.... then something else. And got everyone sick, including grandparents.

I useto get sick every 2-4 months, every year, for years, just common cold/flu, not sure what it was....

Regardless, before i left to asia about 2.5 years ago, i got 5 reccomended travel vaccines

Since then, i have been mildly sick, a total of 2 times in 2.5 years. I wish i took all of those vaccines a decade ago, or maybe i should start taking yearly flu shots, as i have never before

He most certainly doesn’t. I don’t remember what the last post was about the topic but it made me laugh :p



Sidenote: Hondaracer, do you work a “9-5” ThAts Monday-Friday with probably 5+ weeks of vacation a year?

Pfizer's announcement:

https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2021/1...icron-variant/

Preliminary lab tests from Pfizer indicate that a third shoot of Pfizer, the booster shot, increases protection against Omicron by 25 times.

The companies say preliminary lab tests suggest a third dose of its vaccine neutralizes antibodies to the new variant — comparable to the protection two doses provides against the original strain of COVID-19 and other variants.


“Although two doses of the vaccine may still offer protection against severe disease caused by the Omicron strain, it’s clear from these preliminary data that protection is maximized with a third dose of our vaccine,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement.

The company says the booster shot appears to increase protection by 25-fold.

I have a cushy job with lots of vacation yes

My previous employment though I worked 5-6 days a week 9-11 hours a day. Demanding management position so I know both worlds and in both you have the people who find any excuse not to show up.

Not to say people shouldn’t have paid sick days, but the more you give, the more people take. Especially in lower-end employment.

I want that Quebec-made Medicago vegan vaccine now. Apparently it is more effective against the variants than Pfizer (except for Omicron since it wasn't tested against it), and it is made from plants, so it's vegan!

I wonder whether some of the anti-vax blockheads will take this vaccine since it basically nullifies a ton of their so-called justifications...

Sick days should be used when they can be... I'm guilty myself in the past I would come in sick because I worked in a place where you should man up and be part of the team and being sick was like admitting weakness lol...

That said, I work in the fed system... and there's definitely abuse it's pretty obvious. Like for myself, I have accumulated almost 1,400 hours of sick leave I can use... which is about 168 days... but I know people who started the same time as me who have absolutely none. So they've been off 160+ days more than I have in the same period of time...

Were they sick all those times? I find it a bit hard to believe lol...

At the same time, for myself, I'm very thankful that a) I haven't had a reason to use them all these years like no illness severe enough or whatnot (knock on wood) and b) that they are there if I wasn't so lucky and something did happen...

It all comes around in the end, there's a decent chance the people who kinda cheated the system and burned all their days every year may get seriously ill and have no recourse. There's a chance I could leave and all those hours went for nothing too... or they come through and do what happened to Canada Post and take it all away and replace it with set annual days that don't accrue. Who knows...

If you’ve used 160 days even over a 10 year period you’re just a burden to the company.

Of course the govt. would never see it like that lol

Oh believe me they do... they dooooo......... and those people are.

But, sadly, unions have become less about fighting for the rights of workers... and more about defending the rights of people who even the other workers don't think deserve to be defended.

Thank goodness in my experience they're few and far between. There's 1 in every single office though and that's enough to make a bad impression/pollute the atmosphere for sure.

IMO, it makes no sense that sick days can be accumulated. Especially for gov employees at any level, if a person requires an extended leave of absence due to some sort of sickness, he should be covered under short term disability anyway.

For some women, menstrual pain can be really, really severe. If you were one of those women, even having 12 sick days a year wouldn't be enough. But then comes the question for us men -- if the ladies are entitled to a minimum of 12 sick days a year, do we get 12 sick days for... well, I can't say out loud what's on my mind because that'll get me banned lol~

Feels like mandatory available sick leave of X days and having that carry over seems kind of stupid where now you have this huge liability of someone who has 160 days accumulated. Given a certain medical condition one should be lawfully excused from working and still be paid. This isn't a sweat shop in the middle of a 4th world country.

Mental leave is part of sick leave imo as well. I've had a triple release over two weeks and cranked out 6x11hour days for 2 weeks and after the last release got kicked out I took a sick day off to recover. My coworker who was in the whole thing with me did as well. My manager said I know what you guys were doing, and it's totally fine, taking a mental break is part of being sick as well.

Now I'm curious what you are thinking about.

Funny our ideals line up fairly closely, and I want to know if I'm gonna get banned for the same thing HAHA

With Covid, the abuse will be even more. "Oh, I'm feeling feverish or a slight sore throat, or sniffle", better I stay home, might be Covid symptoms.

Funny enough since we've been in work from home, nobody uses sick days anymore. Not even the abusers lol...

My mom works for a bank, has for the last 25 years or so. She’s accumulated a shit load of sick days as she’s virtually never sick. Their policy however is that if you don’t use them, you don’t get paid out for them.

So now she’s set to retire this month but the retirement will end in like 100+ days of consecutively being sick and all the BS that does with doing that. She’d be fine in even getting half the value in a one time pay out and be done with it but this is the way Hr recommend she use them before retiring..

Heard on the news this morning apparently there's an invisible strain of omiricon? That can't be detected by PCR tests, also two out of the 4 cases in BC we had were double vaxed. But then they did get it from traveling.

My mom had a coworker that recently passed away. He had a cough then went into the ER because he was having troubles breathing, fell in a coma, and passed away after a few weeks. She said his wife said that the doctors didn't know what was going on and that the COVID tests were coming back negative.

Not sure if related, but yeah, the invisible strain comment reminded me of this. Pretty sad situation because the guy just turned 65 and was about to retire.

I would be considered one of those low end employees. Working in the service industry seeing thousands of strangers a day, you get sick literally constantly. Since covid, everyone washing hands and wearing masks that has significantly dropped. I think I have used one or two sick days this year for really really bad migraines, and a few for helping with my child.

If you’re sick, you’re sick. End of story, stay home. But I assume when you are talking about abusing you mean the ppl that just want more days off. Again, working in a “low end” job, you work in places that offer the minimum lunch time, often run 24h a day, 7 days a week, and very often overworked and understaffed. Work/life Balance is virtually nothing, and you get paid the ~15-20/hr to sacrifice your entire life. If a business sees that 80% of their sick calls are happening on either Saturday or Sunday, they need to step back and figure out why.

Not everyone lives to work

A lot of these people in those scenarios literally do though lol..

You’re on your second marriage with 3 kids and a deadbeat wife and gotta pay dem bills? Your choices kinda led you to literally having no other option but to work and you’re still finding ways to call in lol..this was in the construction industry so you get all sorts but more often than not the people who legitimately NEEDED to work were the ones who would find a way out of it.

People like that just shoot themselves in the foot everywhere they go though. You build equity within any company you work for. If you’re using sick days all the time, especially in the construction industry, you’re on a slippery slope. Covid or not, many industries will frown upon even the good samaratin that stays home in an attempt to not get others sick

Easy solution. Just change the pronoun on your email signature to (she/her).

better yet (they/them) and you'll be unfireable! :whistle:

Ah yes, the construction industry, the pinnacle of employment standards.

Don't get me wrong, I have huge respect for the industry and I deal with construction crews usually from the owner's side of things, but the old timers who still think HSSE is a farce and being sick means you're a pussy are still prevalent, and the young labourers just feed off that mantra. Thankfully management at most medium-to-large companies are instigating changes.

Also for any high profile or large scale jobs, at least during the peak of covid, you so much as cough and you're removed from site until you test negative, so your experience is as anecdotal as mine.