I’m not greedy for wanting pay rise, insists IT worker off sick for 15 years
Gravely ill IBM worker sues tech giant for not increasing his salary
Yeah, right. He’s been on £50k for 15 years. The rest of us get what, 30 days at full pay? Then onto statutory?
Of course freelancers get zero minutes.
Now, if the illness had been caused by the job, well, perhaps. But anything else this is just gold digging.
He should get whatever the contract says. And IBM should have purchased staff sickness insurance from a third-party instead of handling it in-house, precisely to avoid such headlines.
They describe him as an IBM worker. Surely to qualify as a worker you have to do some actual work.
“The rest of us get what, 30 days at full pay? Then onto statutory?”
About 10 years ago when I was a manager in further education colleges, I recall staff getting six months on full pay, then another six months on sick pay before we got shot of them. The more adventurous would spin it out for as long as possible, finishing off with a final accusation that they had been made sick by racism, homophobia, or sexism, going for the rare but big win of a constructive dismissal ruling.
The most accomplished player was an Asian contract manager who I followed into a job. He had done absolutely nothing for a year, turning up at the office once in a while and then going off to help run his sister’s catering business. He’d literally stuffed an impressive set of folders with waste paper, to make it look as if he kept records. When rumbled, he went sick, and so managed to stay on the payroll for a further six months, claiming that any cooperation with his employer would exacerbate his work-induced stress.
@Andrew M – from what I gather, the arrangement was a compromise deal, so they were being generous here. Bear in mind, they have already given him over eight and a half grand to settle his whining about holiday payments. Given that his case was dismissed – rightly so – I think we can take it that they had stuck to the terms of any contract. The only possible upside would be if he had to pay IBM’s costs.
None of the news reports I have read came anywhere close to the highly relevant question of what exactly is wrong with him.
Neither did the 16 page tribunal ruling.
I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if the term self-certification was involved.
@John
“Ian Clifford, a 50-year-old senior IT technician, was signed off work in 2008 for mental-health related reasons and was diagnosed with stage four leukaemia in 2012.”
Considering his sick pay how is IR35 justified? I am pretty sure no contractor at IBM would have got anything like that.
50 years old and still just a technician? Surely should have made engineer by now.
Oh wait, 35 years old and a technician, followed by 15 years off work.
Sam Vara
One of the major problems with real crap employees who are dismissed actually or constructively is that under current risk averse HR and legal advice practice the employer almost never gives a reference of any sort let alone an accurate one warning the next employer what a useless or harmful cvnt they were because they don’t want the hassle, time and costs of any possible claim for damages.
“The rest of us get what, 30 days at full pay? Then onto statutory?”
10 days seems to be the norm in the accountancy profession.
6 months in the public sector.
BraveFart
Exactly so. I used to write references for staff who were working in my departments. HR passed us the reference request, and I took it from there. Then one day we were told to stop doing that, and HR wrote a “flat” reference containing no more than dates and job roles. We were told that it was in our interests, because if they didn’t get the new job we might be stuck with dud employees.
When the Principal and CEO of my college was asked to leave because of what appeared to be an uncontrollable addiction to gay porn and risky sexual behaviour, he walked straight (ahem!) into a comparable job. So I can only assume that any reference was less than honest.
@Sam Vara – I was told years ago that there was a coded set of terms HR would use in references as warnings to the new employer: “the junior members of staff will miss his attention and support” = sex pest, “his convivial personality” = functioning alcoholic and so on. It all had to stop once litigation became an issue.
“mental health”, AKA “stress”, used to be a straight six months, for those who had the brass neck to pursue it. It could be made pretty well permanent if a short resumption – a few weeks at most – occurred between each six months.
I am incredibly cynical whenever I hear of cases like this. Before any starts, I know there are genuinely deserving case, but it is SO easy these days for that small percentage of wastrels to ruthlessly exploit the zeitgeist which is that it is always easier to pay them off. Fuck the majority of honest and hardworking staff.
This individual may be totally justified and genuinely deserving (doesn’t sound like it) but I just assume things these days. Usually correctly.
One needs to be careful here – we must not generalise from this individual who appears unreasonbly greedy to condemn others who are genuinely sick when absent. I can remember one guy who was only a year older than I but significantly senior (he went up to Cambridge at 17 and didn’t piss off HR which my mere existence did): he was on sick leave on full pay for six months, which was then extended for special resons, but did recover and return to work whereafter his performance continued to justify this treatment. My direct boss more-or-less told me in coded words that he was a type 1 diabetic and hinted that the change in the Insulin provided by NHS had caused this.