Spread the Sickness

I have a friend who retired from her job a couple years ago and now works as a temp. She loves it except for one thing – the guilt the temp agency tries to lay on her every time she has to call in sick. As she thinks back through her employed life, she realizes that several employers pulled that guilt card on all their employees over the years.

She remembers at least once when she and the other employees that could drag themselves to work were trapped for 8 hours a day in an office where every second employee was coughing his/her head off. She remembers that particular winter because one employee took it upon herself to make the rounds of the entire office area every couple of hours, spraying the air with antibacterial aerosol, in an effort to keep the relatively healthy employees ... relatively healthy. It was, she says, a very long winter.

Every so often, you hear about a study about lost productivity due to illness. Every time I hear about that, I wonder how much time and productivity would be lost if a sick person wasn't guilted into coming to work when they should be home, taking care of themselves. If the sick employee stayed home for a couple days, and was actually well when s/he went back to work, how long would it take for that person to get caught up? How much extra would the other employees have to take on to muddle through those 2 days?

On the other hand, Employee A isn't feeling well, but comes to work anyway. Because A doesn't get the rest s/he needs, s/he is sick at work for 3 days. During that time, A is lucky to be working at half capacity, is prone to make mistakes, and infects a number of co-workers. So, let's see, 3 days of work is half done, so A is 'only' 1 ½ days behind, except for going back and correcting mistakes that were made. Sound like an even trade to you? Does it stay 'even' when you start counting in all those other employees who caught that same sickness and continued to spread it to other employees? And some of them are sure to seek a doctor's advice, so it seems to me that tips the scales a bit further.

Doctors want you to stay home and take care of yourself when you're sick, and they make their money on people being sick. Employers, apparently, want employees to spread the sickness.