OT,OT: gotta vent!

Hang on Seanette - you'd rather have seen another child maybe end up in ER with dehydration and at the extreme dead because another mother couldn't look after her child - who nobody's doubting she had for love- and keep the child at home away from infecting other children . I'm a believer I have to say in ' my children are my responsibility' I may ask for help but at the end of the day , I bore them - they are mine Jan "Seanette Blaylock" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Or someone's child dies of infection / dehydration because another mother wasn't able to look after her own child at home ? "Seanette Blaylock" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Mostly Eastern Bloc, I believe.

OK, so you bring in your germs and give them to a co-worker, who ends up losing HER job because you didn't want to risk losing yours. She's the innocent victim of your self-centeredness.

So the 'immune-compromised' person got to stay at work, but the 'sick' person had to stay home and lose pay, so the 'immune-compromised' wouldn't get sick and lose pay? ...sounds pretty odd to me. Plus, how would he prove who brought the germ to work anyway? I think most of us have heard of 'carriers' who never exhibit symptoms.

I work in a place where if you don't work, you don't get paid...no sick time at all. What choice do employees have, but to come to work when they are ill. I've certainly gone to work when I've had a cold. Two weeks ago I went to work after being up all night upchucking. If I hadn't I would have ended up with only 9 1/2 hrs. of work instead of the crummy 13.5 that I was scheduled for.

Would you believe that a few weeks ago an employee at my work place who was working contacted a supervisor to say she was ill and needed to go home. The supervisor told her she had to find her own replacement before she could go home. I was so ticked! I told the ill employee to phone the head of personell, tell her she was ill and going home...end of story! She finally told the supervisor she was leaving. Good gried, amazing that in this day and age this stuff still happens.

...Linda

Not odd at all. If you stay home for a day while you're contagious, you lose one day's pay. If you DON'T stay home, the immune-compromised person loses a month's pay, and gets stuck with a huge hospital bill. And that assumes that the resultant illness doesn't kill her.

It was simply less of an inconvenience to the healthy people to stay home than it was for the immune-compromised person to get deathly ill. She'd been with the company for years and years -- was there when I started -- so was a valued employee that we wanted to keep healthy.

Karen C - California had some very interesting things to say about Re: OT,OT: gotta vent!:

Better to make her kids the victims of your insistence on being sheltered? If your immune system is so dainty (I use "you" in the general sense, not about the specific person to whom I am replying) that exposure to even the most minor sniffle is a devastating medical emergency, HOW do you cope with shopping or any other form of contact with other human beings? It's a sure bet that the supermarket doesn't screen customers for germ-free status (or make them dunk in disinfectant). Likewise the library, LNS, etc.

If one of my co-workers *itched that her kids were going to be homeless because the boss made her go home on my account, I would rustle up a day's pay to give her, out of gratitude for my not losing a month's pay and having a horrendous hospital bill.

However, I will repeat my prior suggestion, find some pick-up work (babysitting or cleaning if you have no job skills), do it every Saturday for one month, and put that $200 in a savings account so that when you are forced to take a sick day, you have some money to fall back on so you're NOT homeless because you lost a day's pay. It's a lot easier for you (generic you) to save up enough to replace a day's pay than it is for someone with a faulty immune system to save up enough to replace a month's pay PLUS a $100,000 hospital bill so that you can come to work sick and make me not just sick but half-dead.

A lot of this requires drumming it into EMPLOYERS' heads that a waitress who coughs on the food, a salesman who sneezes on the customers, a laundry worker who pukes on the clean clothes is not impressing the customers, and should be sent home till they are well.

Early on, I worked for a skinflint who didn't want to pay us $5/hour if we were only doing $1 worth of work, and drilled it into us that if we weren't going to earn our pay, he didn't want to have to pay us that day

-- stay home. More employers need to get tough with their employees that they will only get paid for the day if they can do enough work to justify being there, and if they aren't working at full speed, the employer is not going to reward them with a full paycheck for half the work. Fire people for spreading germs, instead of for doing the responsible thing and keeping their germs at home.

Although a certain former employer will never admit it, there is no benefit to the bottom line in having a whole office full of flu patients all winter, every winter; the firm would have been much better off confining each variant of flu to one employee, rather than all 25 of us having variants A through Z and accomplishing darn little most of the winter. By golly, they weren't paying us to stay home and do nothing, though some days, they might just as well have, since no work actually got done between the bathroom sprints, the chicken soup fixing/eating, and the commiserating.

You know, that's just part of doing business. Every business has to plan for the fact that employees will occasionally be sick. They will also take vacations and have accidents and all sorts of other absences. Any business owner who doesn't recognize and plan for that is not doing his or her job properly. Obviously, it's more difficult for smaller employers to have backup than larger employers who have more infrastructure, but once again, that's just a fact of business life. Employees have a duty not to miss work capriciously, but they cannot be expected to somehow be superhuman and immune to illness or other issues that cause unplanned loss of work days. Of course it's hard for employers to find backup someetimes, but running a business ain't easy, and that's part of the reason why.

Best wishes, Ericka

Yes, it is part of business, we all understand that, but the problem is this is one reason why employees don't take sick time or vacation time. They can't afford to return to work and discover another worker has been hired.

For instance: There were 4 employees in the area I work, one often phones in sick either because of her own illness or her daughters, she also has two weeks vacation this summer, another employee (college age) found a full-time job for the summer, but works with us a couple of nights a week, that ends up leaving two of us to cover. The company hired a fifth person for the area to cover our vacation time this summer, as I have three weeks and the other gal has two. So, this means when we are at work our hours are reduced in order for this gal to get at least 20 hrs. per week. All of this makes good business sense,

The big "but" in all this is that if we have an extra person hired to cover sickness, etc., not only do we not get paid for our sick day we also lose hours when we are at work so the 'extra person' gets some work., to go from 25 to 30 hrs. per week down to 20 hrs. per week or less makes a big difference over a year.

...Linda

Ericka Kammerer wrote: >>We recently had five workers >>call in sick on a Sunday, and it was extremely difficult to find >>people to replace them.

If you have five people call in sick on the same day, then it's pretty clear that they were all exposed to the germ on the same day, and probably from the same person. And this was one of the things the Big Guy was trying to avoid by telling us not to come in sick. If the whole staff gets exposed to Bill's germs on Monday, then the whole staff is going to call in sick on Thursday, and then you'll really be up the creek. If Bill stays home, then one of them will pick it up Sunday at church and be out Wednesday, another will pick it up Tuesday at bowling and be out Friday, and you're operating one person down all week instead of being down fifteen people all on the same day. And those of us with reduced immune systems hopefully won't pick it up at all, because we're smart enough to avoid every place that isn't work during flu season. (Any shopping I have to do in January and February gets done online, including the groceries.)

If your business has been in business for any length of time at all, you have retirees. Some of whom would be willing to be "on call" for such emergencies. Or maybe you've hired students over the summer, who cannot juggle a full-time job during the school year, but would be willing to come in for a day here or there for some extra spending money. As I recall, Linda's in retail -- retail hires a lot of temporary people for Christmas shopping. They're trained, why not use them during flu season, too?

Or, God forbid, realize that it's an emergency and pay overtime pay to someone who works a different shift. When DH and I were on different work schedules, I had no great attachment to my evenings/Saturdays, because I was just going to be sitting home alone till 9:30 PM anyway -- I was willing to work evenings/Saturdays in an emergency, and everyone knew it. DH was always willing to work another shift just for the money.

In various places that I worked, the head honcho's wife and/or kids were available for backup in an emergency. No, Missy couldn't do the technical stuff, but I could hand her copying or envelope stuffing, which freed up an hour of my time to do the technical stuff. And it's amazing how much of the work management can do when you're short-handed.

Sometimes, it's necessary to accept that not all the work is going to get done that day, so you prioritize. Obviously, all customers need to be waited on, but you could not be as diligent about re-folding the clothing displays, or refill the salt shakers only when someone complains that it's empty. You'd be surprised how many customers find more patience when the hostess apologizes as she's seating them "we've got two people out today due to the flu, so service might be a little slow".

As Ericka says, there are going to be valid reasons for employees to take days off, and the employer needs to plan ahead for that. It's not necessary to hire a bunch of additional "part-time employees" as Linda suggests, if you've got access to temporary workers, i.e., the retirees or students back in school. If the only solution Linda's employer can see is having extra permanent employees, then they need to learn to think outside the box, or hire a consultant with more imagination than they have themselves.

I've run businesses. We always had someone who was available on-call -- one of our guys worked a weird schedule at his real job, so his "weekend" was mid-week; the rest of the guys knew to schedule appointments for days he was available to cover for them. We had people who were willing to work extra hours (i.e., till sundown instead of till

4:30). In a crisis, I could be drafted out of the office to run a landscape crew or provide an extra pair of hands; it was not beneath my dignity to get my hands dirty (I hate gardening, but you do what you gotta do to make the business a success).

No, not true.... The five workers were scattered throughout the store, they did not all have the same illness, and it could have been a customer or one of their kids who had been ill, plus not all the employees were actually 'sick'. I was trying to make the point we were 'short-staffed', because the employees called in 'sick'.

The thought to call in retirees is not an option. Can you imagine the hassle of putting them on payroll for only a short period of time? In addition to that they would have to be re-trained meaning additional wages. Students are sometimes hired, but they are often more trouble than they are worth, as they need at least two part-time jobs to equal a full-time job, so the regular staff end up working around the students schedule...not a good option. Christmas staff are hired for Christmas, and terminated as of Dec. 31. Again, they would have to go through re-training.

What I can tell you is that in the current work place many employers are only hiring part-time staff. They want emplyees who will work 7 days a week, and whatever shift the company wants them to work. They want to work part-time employees between zero and 37.5 hrs. per week, but with no gurantee of a minimum amount of hours. They do not want us to have a life away from work. They also do not pay any sick days. The company has no choice but to increase the number of part-time employees in order to cover vacation time, sick days, emergencies, etc. In turn this means we are often over-staffed so that all employess get some hours/pay year round. It's hard to explain what a typical workplace is these days, it has definitely changed in the last

10 years...and not for the better :(

...Linda

And when employers can get away with treating employees like dirt, it's not particularly surprising that they have staffing challenges. It will change for the better when employees do their best to move to better positions, and when customers refuse to patronize businesses that treat their employees poorly.

Best wishes, Ericka

I have to add to this a line of reasoning:

To me, it is no surprise that the demise of union workers also saw declines in the fairness of work places.

As much as union bosses plunged money into the political machines, at the same time, Congress was dismantling workers rights at the Federal level, and States dismantling them at the State level.

Although people like to point fingers at unions and call them greedy, lazy workers, the fact is that the rights they won spilled over into the general workforce. Now that it is a shadow of its former self, it is no surprise to me that the general workforce is suffering.

Dianne

Ericka Kammerer wrote:

I totally agree with you, unfortunately the working conditions for retail haven't changed over the past 30 yrs. and I can't see them changing anytime soon.

I often wonder why people refer to Walmart as being crummy to staff, when it's *all* large retailers who treat their staff poorly. Walmart is only one of many...

take care, Linda