This may have already happened to some of you but I recently got an email from my employer that said they were ending the special sick leave for covid. The reason? The state is lifting their covid requirements and masking requirements and opening everything back up. They said it is time we all begin to learn to live in a world with covid, like we have with the flu or the common cold. The special leave was up to 10 days of sick time for covid positive employees. The kicker, if you are covid positive you are still required to isolate for 5 days before returning to work.
This pissed me right the hell off, and I don't even have to worry about sick leave. I'm in an elevated position at the firm and I don't really need to use sick time. If I miss a whole day sure I clock it as sick but if I work even 1 hour I get paid my salary. I also have the freedom to do work from home, unlike many, employees at our firm. I'm pissed because my role relies on front line employees, and when morale drops, when people are sick, when people quit, or when people show up to work sick, I lose. They lose, we all fucking lose. Every frontline employee will probs get covid next year and it will cost no less than 3 sick days and up to 5. Basically the company has slashed sick time by 30-50% and said just live with it.
So I emailed HR. I told them this makes me feel less safe, and less comfortable. I told them it could be disastrous for retention and hiring, and certainly for morale. I then went to the suggestion part of our internal and typed up a suggestion that they at minimum just increase sick time to 15 days a year for all non work from home, but preferably for all employees.
I then pulled our revenue information and calculated an average wage/benefit expense per hour per employee. This is multiplied by 80 (2 weeks additional sick), and we have an average cost per employee. Multiply that by about 60% of the work force and I have a total cost per year. 60% is being generous as only about 30-40% of our work force isn't work from home eligible. This also skews upward because most of our frontline will average about 45% less than all employees combined. I found on the low this would cost .6% of our total expenses, and on the high 1.4% of our total expense budget. And that's if everyone took all 10 days off, which very few do. I'm going to put together a slide and see if I can get in front of someone who matters.
Cutting someones security blanket during a recession, with upcoming employment pressures and a virus still forcing people out for 5 days is just plain savage. This is how you get people to quit, just keep busting them down. When they have to start closing locations due to lack of staff maybe they will wake up and knock this off.
This is all not to mention that more people will just show up to work sick and/or covid positive then before. This will lead to more covid call outs and more people running out of sick time. Another capitalist viscous cycle against the worker.
TLDR: Work is removing the 10 days of special covid sick leave but still requiring 5 day isolation if you are positive. This means about 30-40% of our staff will likely lose 3-5 days of sick time each year they test positive for covid, which will probably be every year. I am working on petitioning the company to give more sick time and it would only cost them .6-1.6% more. It would be about 4-5% of their annual operating income to offer 2 weeks to every employee assuming they all used all 10 days of extra sick time.
(Also posted on r/LateStageCapitalism)