Over at Caramel (Learner at Love), CARAMEL has started a new prompt. I’d like to see her prompt do well, and I had some time today to write a post, so here we go…
The prompts are called the Caramel Crunch and so far are centered around a moral question. For your convenience I shall repeat her question.
You have a horrible cold and you realize you are infectious. However, there is a culture in your workplace of still attending work when you are ill. You realize that if you phone in sick, your manager will then have to spend time ringing other staff and may not be able to find someone else who can cover your shift. You realize that the other staff will be under a lot of pressure to keep up with the work. They always turn up for work even when they are ill.. What would you do?
This is another easy one for me. Let’s take it step by step. A culture of still attemding work when you are sick is code for a culture of going into work and infecting healthy people.
There’s one reason. If you’re infectious, stay home and don’t infect anybody else. Some people want others to think of them as martyrs, but in reality they are a risk to everybody else’s health.
Second, the manager might have trouble covering you. Tough. That’s the manager’s fault for not forming (or training) a team with sufficient diversity of its skills. How many of us has been promised on-the-job training which has been non-existent?
The last thing to point out is that in the UK, somebody can take up to a week’s sick leave, without anybody’s say-so excpt their own. Certification from a doctor is only required when you go beyond this timespan. That’s the law. If your manager doesn’t like that, they should speak to their MP.
My background? I worked for myself for twenty years. If I didn’t work, either through holiday (even public holidays) or sickness, I didn’t get paid. It would have been in my interests financially to work 24/7. But, you know, we need some distance at times – holidays to recharge our batteries, and time to recover our health when we’re below par. When you’ve worked for yourself for long enough, you realise that downtime is neecessary regardless of the cash.