This was inspired after seeing the original article posted here. It’s pretty basic stuff for this community but you never know.
This was inspired after seeing the original article posted here. It’s pretty basic stuff for this community but you never know.
Something about this which was bothering me: companies spying on their employees is indeed illegal. Employers even asking what illness their employee has is illegal. If an employer has an actual reason to suspect the illness is faked, then they can investigate, but even then the boundaries of what the employer or detective can do are quite limited.
A German site talking about this suggested employers lay off workers who take “too many” sick days and pay them a moderate severance compensation, as this will be cheaper than hiring the detective, defending the surveillance in court when the employee ultimately sues, paying the employee compensation, and likely losing them anyway due to complete breach of trust.
I think they can get around it in several ways. The scab is very quiet about the methods he uses and for good reason. But it’s probably at the very basic level checking the employee’s social media accounts to see if they’re posting from outside their home on their sick day. I’m not familiar with labor laws in Germany but in some places it’s also quite easy to fire an employee despite protections by citing a reasonable but unrelated reason, e.g. redundancy, cost, etc.
Being out and about on a sick day is usually fine, a worker may do whatever they like on their sick days which contribute to getting healthy again, and what that is is nobody’s business except the worker and their doctors.
To be fired an employee must be warned for the same violation of company policy on three separate occasions within one year before they can be fired. (Eg. faking being sick three times.) Unrelated but reasonable excuses don’t fly, the employee can sue and typically wins.
But of course the detectives are shady about their methods, they’re operating on the knife’s edge of what’s legal.