A Boring Dystopia

There has to be some limit for the company. Let's forget a minute about big evil corporation and take a little local company that hire a new person that is needed to run the shop. If this person is absent unlimited and you don't have the funds to hire a replacement, should you just close the shop? It doesn't mean we can put an arbitrary limit on sickness but rather than at some point the company have the liberty to let you go if you can't fulfil your part of the contract anymore in the forsable future. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be a system to help the sick person recover, but maybe that's not the company's job past a certain time, and rather the role of social/health insurance.

Where I've worked you'd hit a limit after a certain number of consecutive sick days and then move on the a short or long term disability package which wouldn't be at full pay but not ruinous either. I'm not sure those are usable to care for somebody else though

"out of sick days" -- what in the name of fuck is that??

Sincerely, Europe

They likely can. They're paid not to frame it that way though.

Just a small component being circumvented. Orphan crushing efficiency was not even dented.

They had guillotines.

We need more of that shit to keep the assholes in line.

Europe didn't buy the crap sold by 'economist' witch doctors like Milton Friedman and Alan Greedspan. At least, they didn't buy it as much.

The US treats capitalism as a religious absolute. The rest of the world regards the US as a fairly extreme example of laissez-faire capitalism.

Lots of True Believers really thought that if you didn't regulate anything and just let companies become more and more powerful, somehow the world would be a better place for it.

Check out the Chicago School of Economics if you want to know what really has brought us to this point. Hugely influential and hugely misguided, but it made a lot of men very rich and powerful so it was seen as a good thing 🤦

EDIT: Apologies to Witch Doctors everywhere.

Unions are much stronger in Europe. In the US they're a lot more limited in what they can do, if a strike would be too disruptive, which is, you know, the whole fucking point of a strike, the government can just forbid it.

In this case it reaching that point makes a glimmer of sense. No individual has the authority in this case to say "Hey - this is tragic and we need to make an exception to take care of our employee."

Public employees have very little discretion on things like this. I work in government, and sometimes our hands are 100% tied by code. The difference between private and public rules is that changing or making exceptions to many of our rules requires public hearings and action from elected officials.

I spent an hour today walking a citizen through a process where they were going to have to apply for a permit that I would then deny so they could appeal my decision to P&Z and then Council, and how the 30-day mailed notification requirements to neighbors prior to each meeting combined with the meeting schedules would mean that it couldn't go to P&Z until their March meeting, and then Council in May (because the notification letter for Council has to include the P&Z recommendation).

I think what they're wanting to do is fine, but I don't have the authority to make that decision.

I'll take a stab at explaining from my (limited) experience. US schools receive funding from many sources, but the budget is set locally (usually once a year) by administrators and approved by a locally elected school board. When administrators make the budget they have to estimate how much money to set aside to pay substitute teachers. The administrators don't know which or how many teachers will get sick so they distribute sick hours to the teaching staff evenly. You can think of sick hours kind of like getting 'shares' in the substitute fund. Now as teachers work for a district over time these sick hours continue to accrue. Basically it means teachers who have worked there for a long amount of time and haven't needed to use the hours have hundreds of 'shares' in the substitute fund. People with a lot of accrued hours can transfer them to other employees. The amount of 'shares' in the substitute fund stays the same, but the 'owners' change. Meaning the giver loses their promise of substitute coverage, but the district can continue paying for both the sick teacher's salary AND a substitute teacher to cover their classroom, AND buy those new crayons they promised. Hope that all made sense.