Soldiering on

I was fascinated to read health secretary Matt Hancock’s comments about how Britons should stop “soldiering on” by going to work when sick and making others ill. He added: “Why in Britain do we think it’s acceptable to soldier on and go into work if you have flu symptoms or a runny nose, thus making your colleagues ill? We are peculiarly unusual and outliers in soldiering on and still going to work, and it kind of being the culture that ‘as long as you can get out of bed you still should get into work’. That should change.” Hear, hear, was my immediate reaction until I remembered why people soldier on “when sick and making others ill.” It’s because employers like…er…the government, but certainly not just the government, will threaten you with disciplinary action right up to dismissal if you go sick.

In 46 years in the workplace, most of which was in government, I have never come across a situation whereby staff are encouraged not to come to work when they are ill. On the contrary, it does not take much to find yourself called in for a chat with your manager about your sick leave. As I recall, if you had four separate spells of sickness in a year, or just eight days, a meeting would be triggered.

Earlier in my career, I did take more sick leave, sometimes it has to be said when I wasn’t particularly ill. But by the same token, when my depression and anxiety was at its worst, I suffered – I can’t think of a better word – in silence. For most of the time, I never went sick even if I was very sick. I always went to work when I had cold and flu like illnesses, even if I was absolutely ‘hanging’. Some managers thought more highly of people who still came to work when they were unwell, something that I have continued to experience since I embarked on my subsequent jobs in the third sector. Going sick at work is seen as the adult version of truant.

Much as I share Hancock’s view that people who are sick should not be in work, it has been his government and and the governments of his predecessors who have forced sick people to go back to work and in so doing creating an environment where going to work when sick is somehow normal and even noble, where sick staff have been commended for working when they shouldn’t be.

Of course, there will always be people who take the piss and throw a sickie whenever it suits them. That’s why far harsher rules to deal with staff absences have been instituted from the centre. So, in this instance the health secretary is arguing against the very things his government has always believed in.

Brits are not “peculiar” when working when unwell: it’s literally the culture that’s come from the top, a culture that encourages disciplinary action to be taken against the sick. Nice words, Matt, but in my experience the ‘as long as you can get out of bed you still should get into work’ mindset is the norm. Another example of rich, pampered politicians being wholly, never mind semi, detached from the real world.