Lenient sick leave policies actually aren’t enough when the culture around it acts like never taking sick leave is some kind of virtue. Stigmatize going to work sick. Make it a faux pas proportionate to the actual harm done when you infect your coworkers with disease.
“You should not go to work sick” isn’t something we say because of ouchy hurty feelings and how sickness makes you a little sad baby who needs to be cared for. It’s because diseases spread to other people, and when you’re at work sick, you make mistakes that can be dangerous or expensive. Sick people in the workplace are a net negative by all rational metrics.
paid sick time needs to be put into law NOW
and being an asshole to people who call in sick– even behind their backs, even if they never find out! –hurts everyone.
because, whenever I’m at work and someone else calls in sick, whoever is actually taking the call is usually totally polite and everything… but! the moment they hang up the phone, someone (probably multiple someones) will start ranting about how this person’s lazy and unreliable and/or a total liar and not really sick
and me– (as someone who is almost never sick, due to never really going out anywhere except work, and always masking while I’m there, and was pretty much catastrophically sick the very few times I have called in sick)– I hear that, and it stays in my mind.
and it makes me all the more terrified, the next time I somehow get catastrophically sick and have to call in, despite all my precautions.
Because I KNOW what everyone at work actually thinks of people who call in sick.
and, if they actually don’t think that way about me? if they really do believe me when I’m sick, they just don’t believe other people?
…well, that’s terrifying too!
Because, that just means there’s a threshold where, someday, if my health changes enough, if the frequency of my call-ins increases enough– I will become one of the people who aren’t believed, and get shit-talked behind their backs. And I can’t know where that threshold is.
American workplace culture, including how bosses treat employees and how employees treat each other, is very much based around the assumption that anyone who can lie and cheat to get away with less work and/or more money will do so.
and I mean, I don’t deny that there are people who will lie and cheat for any benefit they can get from it.
That is usually how people reach the point of being rich enough to employ others.
…so when employers assume this, it mostly feels to me like they’re projecting.