Is it unethical to take all your sick days, sick or not?
When employers hire someone, they factor in the costs of covering an absence of X days a year – those are your sick days, and they are considered part of your overall compensation package. Now, if you get paid (or some other incentive) for not taking sick days, good for you.
But if you don’t use all your sick days, and they’re “use it or lose it’, you’re really not getting your full compensation package. It’s like not taking vacation days. (In fact, some employers have gotten smart and lumped vacation and sick days together.) Your co-workers who take all their sick time are getting everything the employer has allocated to them. And they’ll likely be better rested and happier to work there, while you may feel rundown (but not “sick”) and end up feeling overwhelmed or crabby.
I don’t feel it’s dishonest to take sick all your sick days, whether you’re sick or not. I think ideally companies should get with the times, lump all paid days off together and call them “personal days”, but until then I don’t see an ethical problem with getting all the money and time-in-the-form-of-money your employer has set aside for you.
What do you think?
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Posted in Personal Development, Work on March 4, 2008
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I love this question, because I think we all think about it from time to time (if you’re lucky enough to have a job that offers this).
For me I have no problem with it in the sense that I consider it a “mental health” day. I work for a large corporation, on salary, and I have for years now. At my former employer, they had a 1:1.5 hiring ratio policy – in essence, they wanted every employee to be doing the job of what they considered 1 and a half employees. In other words, 60 hour work weeks were the baseline. No overtime since it was salary, just 8AM to 9PM every weekday generally, plus weekends when we were preparing to ship a product.
So, corporations get their fair “pound of flesh”. And I don’t really think I need a doctor to tell me when I need a mental health break to keep me from burning out…although a reminder to do so would probably help.
Great question!