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Coronavirus Sick Leave

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    #32
    randomrb
    Registered Users Posts: 351 ✭✭randomrb


    Dav010 wrote: »
    Would this not apply to all contagious illnesses of varying severity? A large number of people succumb to complications associated with common flu, 64k last year in the US alone.

    Individual businesses should not bare the resposoncibilty of doing what is best for society as a whole, that should fall on a Government. Will society be better served if businesses close and employees become unemployed if employers can not afford to pay employees off sick while income drops due to consumer worries and falling production?

    As linked above, Government is discussing making illness benefit available immediately.

    The problem with illness benefit is that it is either ripe for abuse or you have to see a doctor to get it which will completely overwhelm already busy GP's.


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    #33
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,167 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    Dav010 wrote: »
    Would this not apply to all contagious illnesses of varying severity? A large number of people succumb to complications associated with common flu, 64k last year in the US alone.

    Individual businesses should not bare the resposoncibilty of doing what is best for society as a whole, that should fall on a Government. Will society be better served if businesses close and employees become unemployed if employers can not afford to pay employees off sick while income drops due to consumer worries and falling production?

    As linked above, Government is discussing making illness benefit available immediately.
    Costs that "fall on government" come back to businesses and workers anyway, since they are funded by social insurance contributions. What the system does is manage the cost by pooling it and spreading it across all employers and workers, rather than focussing it on the employers who happen to have a high concentration of people absent from work.

    But the present situation is slightly unusual. In general one of the conditions to qualify for sickness benefit is that you should be actually sick, and if you're not sick you are expected to work as normal. But in the present crisis we are taking the view that people who may be infectious shoul not be going to work. Most of these people will in fact not be infected, and will not be infectious. They won't qualify for sickness benefit.

    So, you could change the rules for sickness benefit, so that people who meet the criteria for self-isolation qualify for it regardless of whether they are sick or not. But now you have a problem of how to police the rules. The current rules involve being actually sick, and this is something which can be checked by a medical examination, and established by a medical certificate. But obviously the extended rules, which don't involve being sick, aren't necesarily something which a doctor can verify or sign off on, so you may need to devise a new system for certifying that people meet these conditions, work out who is going to do the certifying, and prepare and train those people. This takes time. In the meantime the crisis is happening now. And your employer really, really doesn't want you turning up for work if you may be infectious.


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