Focus had a business article this morning in their news, which I felt was interesting. What they hyped up was a discussion last night on the Anne Will chat-forum show (ARD, Chanel One of public TV in Germany).....over a hiring policy within the German Post.
They had the new German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD party) on last night, and he wanted talk about a new policy which he thinks is unfair with the Post Office folks in Germany.
The policy is that when you get hired on....you fall into a temp category (probation) for a while. The new policy says that your permanent contract will depend a lot on the number of sick days that you take.
The new policy is that new employees who come onboard....can only be ill six times in the next two years, and should not have accumulated more than 20 sick days in that period.
Then the cherry on this episode is that new employees can only "cause at most two self-inflicted motor vehicle accidents with a maximum damage of 5000 euros" in that same period.
My wife brings up this continual German problem that she sees.....a person showing up at the doctor's office and getting in a fairly easy way....five days of sick-leave (typically Monday through Friday). Bosses are in no real position to do much.....unless they reach the stage of just saying 'you know....we've had enough of you being out so often, so we are letting you go'.....then having to pay a sum of money as they walk out the door. In her shop, there's some individual who normally uses at least twenty days of sick leave every single year. Oddly, most of it starts on a Monday, and goes through a Friday.
The problem here is that a lot of German companies over the past decade or two....have downsized. They came to realize that they could function with x-number of personnel. Profit-wise, it works. But then getting people to show up and function with a limited number of sick-leave days....is not always possible. All of this lost productivity affects the bottom line of profits.
Why so many sick-leave days? Part of this problem is anxiety, stress, and negativity about the job. Some people are sitting in jobs that they can't handle anymore, and so they use sick-leave like regular leave....to avoid the office and work. You add it up....most Germans get 25 days of regular leave....then you add on 20 more days of sick leave....that's 45 days of leave a year. It's a fair sum. That's nine weeks a year that a full-time employee isn't there.
No comments:
Post a Comment