European Union officials take three times more sick days off work than an average British worker in the private sector, research by The Telegraph suggests.
According to official figures, European Commission officials took an average of 14.6 days off sick last year, with one in seven staff absent for more than 20 days.
By contrast, a survey by the Confederation of British Industry found that British staff working in the private sector took around five sick days a year.
European officials even outstripped Britain’s civil servants and public sector staff, who took half as many days off work.
The stresses and strains of actually running the EU are quite obviously too much. We cannot allow people, good, honest even if continental, folk to be subjected to such horrifying conditions.
We’ll just have to close the whole thing down I’m afraid.
Perhaps we could encourage them to take at least 250 sick days a year?
It should also be noted that, unlike the EU figures, UK “public sector” figures are biased by including NHS Trusts where even non-medical hospital staff are strongly discouraged, in many cases, from attending work if they are ill, on the perfectly sensible grounds that bringing a minor cold in to work, in a hospital, might affect quality control on the raw materials (oh, sorry, did I mean patients?)
Surreptitious Evil – “It should also be noted that, unlike the EU figures, UK “public sector” figures are biased by including NHS Trusts where even non-medical hospital staff are strongly discouraged, in many cases, from attending work if they are ill, on the perfectly sensible grounds that bringing a minor cold in to work, in a hospital, might affect quality control on the raw materials (oh, sorry, did I mean patients?)”
Like the way they are strongly encouraged to wash their hands and so stop the spread of Golden Staph?
Not sure that says much about the quality of the figures.
Public stats mangled through the British media and quality?
We can assume that the quality of all three figures is equally poor.
14 days isn’t so far out from public sector averages in the UK. Huge amounts of effort and investment has enabled Bradford Council to drop tits average from 15 days to 11 days.
There are three factors – organisational culture, employment terms & conditions and intervention/prevention/support. Mostly the public sector only addresses the last of these.
In many cases sickness is used as a tactic – I know of one example where a manager actually advised an employee to go on the sick through stress.