If we work together we can stay one step ahead of the orphan crushing machine!
What, you mean like crushing orphans ourselves before anyone else has a chance to?
I may be wrong but I like misinterpretation when the alternative I propose sound a little more accurately descriptive of what’s happening IRL.
Orphan Crushing isn’t the elimination of orphans. It is the opposite. The crushed are the parents who die from a corporate totally-not-slavery-technically literal crush of their life on any degree en masse. It sounds like it removes the life of the orphans and while it does not preserve them, it does inscrease their population to buff that which may be exploited with little consequence.
I was just thinking this fits right in with OCM!
I reckon the orphan crushing machine and the torment nexus are the two core technologies that define modern society.
Parent, forced to choose between poverty and caring for child with cancer, gets a helping hand from coworkers when their employer would just let them starve.
Their employer is the government… our tax dollars and voting record is why this happened.
I’m sure the top military generals have unlimited sick days though (the soldiers can go fuck themselves they should be dying for the empire anyways). Same for senators and congress people who get multi-week paid holidays every year while the country’s stack of pending bills and legislation get higher and higher. So it all balances out in the end!
Yes. The people in the highest echelons of our society get more time off. Not sure if you’re aware of this or not, but they also get paid a lot more
The concept of limited sick days is still so wild for me … if you’re sick, you’re sick.
There has to be some limit for the company. Let’s forget a minute about big evil corporation and take a little local company that hire a new person that is needed to run the shop. If this person is absent unlimited and you don’t have the funds to hire a replacement, should you just close the shop? It doesn’t mean we can put an arbitrary limit on sickness but rather than at some point the company have the liberty to let you go if you can’t fulfil your part of the contract anymore in the forsable future. It doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a system to help the sick person recover, but maybe that’s not the company’s job past a certain time, and rather the role of social/health insurance.
Here in Sweden your workplace will pay 80% of your salary for the first 7 days, and then if you are still sick, you need to get a doctor’s note and then the state will pay you instead.
Also if your kid is sick you can be home with 80% salary paid by the state.
this is extremely sensible and reasonable
This is what a well implemented democratic socialism gets you (The Nordic model)
it’s Social Democratic but ye
Yes I have to use team correctly
B-But why should my taxpayer money go to the welfare of my fellow people /s
This is a very elegant solution, but unfortunately it’s a productive use of our tax dollars so we’ll never do that here in the U.S.
Yeah, this is why in many countries, Australia included, part of parental leave is paid by the state (it’s at minimum wage, which isn’t super high, but much higher than other countrie), and the company isn’t required to pay anything extra (but must let you take leave).
Most employers however, are much more generous than this to attract talent.
Where I’ve worked you’d hit a limit after a certain number of consecutive sick days and then move on the a short or long term disability package which wouldn’t be at full pay but not ruinous either. I’m not sure those are usable to care for somebody else though
I think the problem is that people will obviously abuse this if they were left unchecked. It’s sad but the root of these restrictions aren’t just companies being assholes, it is also a minority of employees being assholes. They drive companies to take these stances.
Citation needed.
It’s not like you say “I feel sick for 6 months, deal with it” but you have to check with your doctor regularly. That’s how it works in Germany. And at some point, you get less payment and when you are chronically ill, you will lose your job at some point. But it’s not a set number of days per year
It’s not a set number for the US either, we have Family Medical Leave (FMLA). When they say you have sick days it’s referring to paid sick leave by your job. If you’re sick you can be out for sick leave for quite a long time and the jobs can’t do anything against you, they just don’t have to pay you. If you’re so sick that you’re on FMLA for a long time you’ll probably qualify for Short Term Disability which you might also supplement with Short Term disability insurance.
I’m talking by experience. I’ve seen people abuse the benefits that the companies give. When the companies find out, they feel betrayed and start restricting those benefits for everyone.
I’m just saying that greed isn’t the only reason behind these issues. That workers also have the responsibility to be respectful towards companies, which isn’t always the case.
Both sides need to be better. Companies even more than workers obviously, but workers ain’t saints either.
Plus, I don’t think that losing your job because you have a serious illness should be acceptable or the mechanism to ensure people aren’t abusing their benefits. Getting a fake doctor’s note is not that difficult.
I’m sure companies would be more open to these changes if those few cases of bad apples didn’t exist. But they exist, so companies are like “ok, if treating you like shit is the only way you won’t abuse the benefits, we’ll go down this path then”. And yeha, it’s just a couple of workers who fuck it up for everyone else.
I think this way of thinking is reductive. There are always going to be people who will abuse the system. You can have all the checks you want, but it’s gonna happen anyway. However, these people are a minority. Most people do want to work, and having the ability to rest and recover when they’re sick no matter how frequent it may be, means they’re doing and feeling much better at work. We shouldn’t refuse to implement things that will benefit everyone because a few people might abuse it.
Yeha, that’s sadly what happens. They punish everyone because a few abuse their trust. Obviously, there are companies out there that are just shitty, I’m just saying that workers also have the responsibility of being respectful with the few companies that are still good. Thankfully I work in a place that lets people take as many sick days as they need and nobody has abused their trust.
Well, it’s not like a significant part of the world is already working with “unlimited” sick days.
It’s not really unlimited, anyway. You will need doctors notices (ofter after a few days), after a while some attestation from certain state doctors, after a while the money will be paid by your health insurance, after a while you will loose your job.
Not to mention that you forfeit chances for promotions and raises.
Taking enormous amounts of sick days won’t be without consequences. Especially not if unjustified.
The difference is that I don’t have a sickness budget.
If I’m sick, i’m sick.
If I’m suspiciously often sick, my employer will talk to me.
Employers don’t understand (or want to understand) the concept of “Lawful evil”, where just because someone is out of sick days doesn’t mean you aren’t a monster for keeping them from their cancer-stricken daughter.
What is terrifying is journalists who work at news agencies can’t tell the difference between a heartwarming altruism story and a slip through the cracks dystopian horror story.
They likely can. They’re paid not to frame it that way though.
So this is in accordance with the news agency’s style guide? I’m not sure if it’s worse if the agency is ignorant or maliciously manipulative.
In the words of Noam Chomsky, “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
That’s what I don’t understand. Europe is capitalist like the US, never the less, such cruelty and greed from the employer are simply unheard of.
They had guillotines.
We need more of that shit to keep the assholes in line.
Europe didn’t buy the crap sold by ‘economist’ witch doctors like Milton Friedman and Alan Greedspan. At least, they didn’t buy it as much.
The US treats capitalism as a religious absolute. The rest of the world regards the US as a fairly extreme example of laissez-faire capitalism.
Lots of True Believers really thought that if you didn’t regulate anything and just let companies become more and more powerful, somehow the world would be a better place for it.
Check out the Chicago School of Economics if you want to know what really has brought us to this point. Hugely influential and hugely misguided, but it made a lot of men very rich and powerful so it was seen as a good thing 🤦
EDIT: Apologies to Witch Doctors everywhere.
Witch doctor here, I’m offended.
/s
As well you should be, sir! :)
Unions are much stronger in Europe. In the US they’re a lot more limited in what they can do, if a strike would be too disruptive, which is, you know, the whole fucking point of a strike, the government can just forbid it.
That conversation gave me such a headache around the rail strike.
“They need sick days and proper pay”
“I recognize that”
“that’s why they’re on strike”
“well if they’re allowed to strike the economy shuts down”
“if they’re so important they should probably get fair pay and benefits shouldn’t they?”
“Well yeah”
“that’s why they’re on strike”
“well if they’re allowed to strike the economy shuts down”
🙄
Fuck the economy. The fact that capitalist society runs on nothing but greed and the desire for infinite growth is an issue, not the economy being “bad”
What I hate is the only measure of “the economy” is the stock market.
The stock market measures nothing but the theft of economic value. Pick any other metric and it’s FUUUUUCKED
That’s why what we really need is for unions themselves to unionize to threaten a general strike. It’s an absolute last resort as it would be a complete economic killswitch, but it’s a threat that can’t be ignored.
It drives me crazy how people almost always fail to see the other answer.
“well if they don’t get sick days and proper pay the economy shuts down”
Like, you’re not even having a debate about which framing makes the most sense, they just don’t see one of them.
What would happen in Europe in this case? Infinite paid leave ?
In Latvia 9 days are payed by employer. Then you officially can have up to 26 weeks payed by government, or extended up to 52 weeks, but that needa a docotrs commision.
However, in case of a sick child it gets trickier, the official longest sick leave in one go you can have is 21 days for that (if you need to be treated at a hospital, 14 at home), all payed by the government. But you can probably just close after 21 and open a new one. You can for sure close, have one day of work and reopen, this has happened to me before.
In India, in such a case we’d typically allow infinite “work from home” leave, assigning the kind of work that he could do without time crunches etc, the medical insurance for employees typically cover families too but if required we’d provide financial support above the insurance to a decent extent but not unlimited for the medical care of the daughter, and unless the guy was a massive cunt, possibly even then, his peers would voluntarily help out sometimes with babysitting or odd jobs etc if he was a single dad. This is all if it was a private business.
With poetic exaggeration -if it was a government job, the guy already has infinite leaves because our government employees just don’t work anyway, unless he does something horrendous like a murder he won’t be fired and he’ll have free but not great medical services available.
I’m honestly having a hard time believing this.
What “work from home” kind of work without time crunches can teachers do? How many teachers work for private businesses?
How many government employed teachers just don’t do any work - to the extent no one would notice if they didn’t show up?
In Australia, sure in a small mum and dad type business the guy wouldn’t be fired, but most businesses couldn’t actually afford to pay the guy to take extended personal leave. Most businesses would do their best to give the guy unlimited unpaid leave, but that’s not a given. People would usually take personal income protection insurance to cover this type of thing.
I’m just not sure what people really expect in this type of situation. For a small or medium business infinite paid leave just isn’t viable.
Even if work from home was possible it’s not necessarily appropriate here. The guy wants to spend time with his daughter. Working from home is not spending time with your daughter, that would be pretending to work from home.
Ah yes that good news of the orphan crushing machine being down for at least one hour…
Just a small component being circumvented. Orphan crushing efficiency was not even dented.
Anywhere I’ve taught, my email has been inundated with requests for sick leave sharing. Depending on where you teach, you have to pay for your sub if you run out of leave.
Inundated? Is that an English word or are you Romanian?
deleted by creator
It’s English, it means flooded/swamped.
I guessed that much but it’s very similar to “inundat” which also means flooded in Romanian
It’s a synonym for “overloaded.”
Is this the proud ignorance I’ve heard about? Was this a poorly executed joke?
I’m tired, boss.
Simply being able to swap sick days is such a foreign concept to me. How does that even work or make sense? I understand being allowed to take a day or several off because you are sick without having to hand in a doctor’s note. So those are your sick days. YOUR sick days. The fact that you can transfer these or use them as currency is just baffling to me. I guess this is some MUH-FREEDOM joke that I’m to European for to understand because I don’t get it.
I’ll take a stab at explaining from my (limited) experience. US schools receive funding from many sources, but the budget is set locally (usually once a year) by administrators and approved by a locally elected school board. When administrators make the budget they have to estimate how much money to set aside to pay substitute teachers. The administrators don’t know which or how many teachers will get sick so they distribute sick hours to the teaching staff evenly. You can think of sick hours kind of like getting ‘shares’ in the substitute fund. Now as teachers work for a district over time these sick hours continue to accrue. Basically it means teachers who have worked there for a long amount of time and haven’t needed to use the hours have hundreds of ‘shares’ in the substitute fund. People with a lot of accrued hours can transfer them to other employees. The amount of ‘shares’ in the substitute fund stays the same, but the ‘owners’ change. Meaning the giver loses their promise of substitute coverage, but the district can continue paying for both the sick teacher’s salary AND a substitute teacher to cover their classroom, AND buy those new crayons they promised. Hope that all made sense.
So you outsource the risk of managing an organization to the workers?
Late stage capitalism indeed…
This exists in Europe too. It’s about company budgeting a certain total number of absent days. If someone needs to be absent longer than budgeted but it’s taken from the pile of other employees, the budget is still respected. This may be easily absorbed by a big company, but not necessarily by a small local shop.
It’s only common for government jobs and isn’t universal there either. Many government jobs in the US receive multiple different types of leave concurrently. So for example you might accrue 12 hrs of vacation leave per month, 8 hrs of sick leave, and have a floating holiday of 8 hrs per year. If you reach a certain cap (say 100 hrs) the vacation leave rolls over into sick leave.
If you quit your job they have to pay out the vacation leave but not sick leave.
The result is that many government employees, with long careers, historically have tons of sick leave they aren’t using (as in several hundred hours). When someone has a life event it’s not uncommon for coworkers to donate some of their leave to the person (think having a baby or a cancer diagnosis).
You can of course take more leave then you have sick days with FMLA, but they will be unpaid (by your job, you may qualify for something like short term disability, idk). Sick leave that you have when you become eligible for pension retirement typically can apply to your retirement (potentially allowing you to retire earlier), but you still have to qualify for retirement first.
If you’re 3 years from retiring and you can’t qualify for early retirement with your leave, then you might have hundreds of hours you’re not going to be able to use.
Some one not only forbid their time off but then allowed other people to use their time and say yup that solved the issue and that person or persons is a cunt/s
In this case it reaching that point makes a glimmer of sense. No individual has the authority in this case to say “Hey - this is tragic and we need to make an exception to take care of our employee.”
Public employees have very little discretion on things like this. I work in government, and sometimes our hands are 100% tied by code. The difference between private and public rules is that changing or making exceptions to many of our rules requires public hearings and action from elected officials.
I spent an hour today walking a citizen through a process where they were going to have to apply for a permit that I would then deny so they could appeal my decision to P&Z and then Council, and how the 30-day mailed notification requirements to neighbors prior to each meeting combined with the meeting schedules would mean that it couldn’t go to P&Z until their March meeting, and then Council in May (because the notification letter for Council has to include the P&Z recommendation).
I think what they’re wanting to do is fine, but I don’t have the authority to make that decision.
Why doesn’t the employer just give them the fucking sick days
Well you can’t do that cuz if you give one employee sick days for their dying child every employee with a dying child is going to want sick days and that might impact the shareholders.
It’s a school?? Who are the shareholders?
The fact that a school has to be pulling this kind of stuff…
Schools have budgets decided by board members who are elected by the taxpayers; and taxpayers don’t like tax hikes! Thus we have the orphan crushing machine.
or government provide better health care & more support to a family with a sick kid? according to the news, they have to travel 100 miles to get the treatment
“colleagues peer pressured into risking own income if being sick”
If this is a public school there is not a lot of evil and greed happening. It’s just people doing their best with very meager funds and budgets they can’t change without board approval. If this issue is important to you, please take a second to learn about the fiscal year 2024 appropriations and consider contacting your federal legislators here.
giving schools meagre resources is evil
Well damn, I sure hope none of his “fellow educators” gets sick
