I live in a country that guarantees 10 days paid sick leave. I found out one coworker (a millennial) at work took time off because she had bronchitis. When she came back, she said “I feel better and poorer”. I said “Why do you feel poorer? You had paid sick leave”. She told me “I just asked for it to be unpaid. I felt bad for the company. It's not their fault I was sick”.
Shocked, I reiterated to her that this is a right that every full-time worker in this country is entitled to when they're sick. I told her next time she should take it, just like I do when I'm sick. More pressingly, when the boss is sick, you can guarantee he's still getting paid.
But here I am, still in shock and actually a little angry, because I see this kind of shit happening all over the place. People doing lots of unpaid overtime, people not taking their paid sick leave, people making sacrifices like continuing to do work on the weekend or on their days off, or bringing work home with you after work hours are over, people passively reacting to unprofessional behaviour like a workmate/client screaming at you/disrespecting you.
What this creates is the further destruction of our rights because this normalises all those terrible behaviours.
I've heard stories of people feeling guilty when they leave at 5:30PM because their workmates have an unwritten rule of staying back longer (and not getting paid for it), and I've seen people stressed out of their minds working late into the night to “put in the hard yards just to get noticed” (plot twist: they seldom do).
If we all, as a collective, behaved in line with our basic work rights (getting paid for the work we do, taking the entitlements we are owed, being treated with respect), we'd have a lot more power.