What is the biggest lesson that employment has taught you?

🇵🇸 Free Palestine 🇵🇸@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 3142 points –
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You've genuinely never seen a job promote their "5 sick days a year" BS like it was generous lol? You also must not work construction. Being sick in construction means even your co-workers will be mad at you, for some reason.

Lineman for a major telecommunications corporation. Just tested positive for covid. The unspoken rule is show up, if you are dead they may send you home. Got lucky since I actually interact with the public. Sent pic of the positive test to manager. Don't know what is going to happen.

Not surprised at all. Companies love to offload their losses to everyone else. If you come in regardless, they don't lose the value your work brings them, while their sick employees spread their crap to everyone and costs society thousands in perfectly avoidable healthcare costs.

Kind of. I work in the humanities industry, so there is a limit to off-days (as with most jobs) but nothing like a set number like five days and definitely nothing like a prohibition like I thought the original commenter was talking about, you just can’t drag it out. However, it wouldn’t be humanities if there wasn’t a human element, and it’s a red flag in the industry if there wasn’t a willingness to accommodate, like I see posts about that all the time like here for example and wonder what anyone saw in them.

Either you're lucky that your field is pretty flexible, or I was unlucky that all the jobs I had, my current one being an exception, were the opposite ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Honestly, in my experience it's a crapshoot and wildly varies from company to company, or even manager by manager basis. But some industries have it really rough. I used to work retail, the exploitation over there is insane. This thread you're linking pretty much lines up with what I know about service too - OP being angry at his colleague for falling sick rather than his employer for guilt tripping him is pretty much par for the course too.

Isn’t it inscribed in law that if you have a perfectly good reason to call in sick, even exceeding five days a year, that it will be granted to you? Even grade school allows something like at least fifteen days a year, as that I think is the maximum time someone can be temporarily suspended. Someone can correct me on that.

I mean... Yeah, sure. The law also says I can't sit on non-chair public infrastructure around here, but is it really being enforced?

Retaliation and abuse from an employer is hard to prove. Fighting back takes energy and time, a thing your average middle-class and lower don't have in large quantities once they're done working. And it can be hard to explain to your next employer that you're in legal proceedings against your ex employer over your working conditions without hurting your chances to be employed in the first place. There's a world of difference between what's in law and what actually happens.