Even more than a day is terrible. If I have a cold or the flu, the last thing I want to do is to go to the doctor. I'd rather just rest up, it goes away in 3-5 days and I can be back at work.

The need for a doctor's notes means one of:

* I explain to my employer, probably don't get paid for those days, and might face disciplinary action or eventually get fired

* I go to the doctor, making my recovery less likely, increasing my stress levels which are already high due to my body fighting an infection, and risk infecting others or worse, catch something else myself for being made to cohabit space with other sick individuals

* I work even though I'm sick. If I do that from the office, I risk contaminating colleagues - and other people I interact with

There's no winning.

From which perspective are you talking about? Workers in Belgium or the US?

That's exactly right.

This article [1] mentions 40% of sick days being from people with long-term (> 6 weeks) illnesses. That's data from one of Germany's large insurers. While I don't know the proportion of those with long-term illnesses, if we assume it's at most 10%, then the average for people with "normal" short-term illnesses is at most 12 days. So much lower.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sind-die-deutschen-wirklich-h...

I guess they do not understand the relevance of the median in this. They just take the average and think it is "good enough"...

>The lack of trust shown there is massive.

All systems based on trust eventually get abused. Not by everyone of course, but catching a few with their hands in the cookie jar is enough to trigger a rethink on the whole trust-based thing. Most corporate German workers I knew were taking a few extra vacation days a year as sick leave, or using fake sick leave(often weeks or months!) as revenge if their employer didn't give them their desired raise or promotion. Their own admission, it's basically an open secret when you move there. Hell, we had German colleagues that would mysteriously get "sick" exactly before the customer delivery crunch, every-single-time, like clockwork.

The problem is when this becomes culturally normalized, more and more people do it as they see those abusing it get away with extra vacation days so then they think why wouldn't they do it too, otherwise they're suckers, right? And so after a while, the abuse starts to become so rampant and obvious to the employers as well, which leads to increasing the cost of doing business in Germany, and so everyone gets the collective punishment if they still wish to keep their jobs and not lose them to neighbouring countries that have cheaper labor because workers there don't abuse this system(yet). That's the same thing that ended 100% remote/WFH jobs and triggered the return to office mandates, too many people obviously scamming the trust based system pretending to work while actually doing nothing.

>I'm making calls on stuff far larger than my sick days. If you can't trust me on sick days, how can you trust me to do my job?

These policies aren't meant to target the German workers making important decisions who have a lot of bargaining power, but those on menial jobs to keep them working on the hamster wheel. It's what the communist system was designed to do to workers too. You keep them busy all day conforming to stupid bureaucracy and queues, and they're too busy to protest or switch jobs, forcing them into indentured servitude. Merz is a product of Blackrock after all. So it's either a 50 IQ move or a long term 500 IQ move.

Anyway, this isn't the first time in recent history when labor privileges were scaled back in Germany. Agenda 2010[1] did similar things, mostly by defanging unions. The truth is that those crazy good perks were gotten by the working class when Germany was the world industry leader post-WW2, but now Germany's industry output is at a 20 year low(thanks to a series of political and corporate self-owns) so it can't afford the same perks like in the past, and needs to scale back its generosity if it wishes to stay solvent. At the end of the day it's just business, and you need business to fund the welfare state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_2010

I had a migraine attack recently; I was able to call my doctor and have him write a sick note for a day over the phone and have it transmitted digitally to my employer. What the fuck would be the point of tormenting myself for half an hour on a noisy public bus in bright daylight in the middle of summer, the waiting in a bright room for half an hour, wait at the bus stop in bright daylight for up to an hour for the next bus back (since I don't know how long I will be at the doctor's office I cannot plan my trip back) and then torture myself for another half hour on the bus back?

It's not like the doctor can do anything but take my word for it when I'm in his office anyway. There is no migraine test you can run. So you might as well cut out all the bullshit and let me rest so I can recover better.

> Can't wait to share the sbahn with feverish people or seeing a live diarrhea attack.

The 2 results I see from this change in policy is:

1. People go sick to work and possibly infect other people

2. Doctors give multi day sick notes (when 1 day would have been enough) to not be bothered again the next day, resulting in people being home longer when not needed.

I genuinely don't understand who looked at this policy change and thought "this will probably help with people working more". The only people that will be working more are the "Hausärzte".

People who call in sick by phone aren't sick

Nobody understands it. Merz never worked. The last time he worked was when he did his service in the Bundeswehr. His Politics can be described as Anti-Merkel: Immigrants are the Evil and the woking class must work for the lowest pay possible and preferably die before they can enjoy retirement; and lastly nobody is right of the CDU.

We're about to find out! Not to mention all the doctors who'll be getting sick from hordes of people with basic cold and flu piling up in their practices.

Man, Merz truly is a genius! You can tell he's had so much experience in normal jobs, truly understands the average worker's situation.

I probably get there, but I have young kids.

But yes, these are averages between 1 person having 12 weeks and 12 people with 1 week. It's most likely power law distributed, so the average will feel weird.

There are people with cancer, severe car crashes and other horrible but temporary medical conditions in this average.

> But, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete"

Okay, let's consider what laws like this (the existing one) do.

In the US most employers don't care if you take a normal number of sick days, don't require a doctor's note, regardless of whether the law allows them to. Sick days are like vacation days, it's your own business how you use them. This is fine. And if you want to make a major long-term disability claim then you'll be expected to prove it, but that seems overall pretty reasonable?

That's the common case. No major incentive for employers to cause friction with workers who are mostly acting in good faith. Then there are employers who are, let's say, less selective about their employees, will hire anyone willing to do the job, but correspondingly then see a high rate of fraud. These employers want to be able to demand evidence all the time because the sort of people they're willing to hire would be taking three months of paid vacation a year as sick days if they could get away with it.

Since the law applies to everyone, what does a law like that do? In the common case it does nothing because the employer doesn't do it regardless. In the high fraud cause it prevents something good and increases actual fraud.

So the only time it does something good is the uncommon edge case on the other side where the employer requires that even though their employees mostly weren't faking sick days. And because most employers for that type of work don't do that, those employers don't get any major benefit from it anyway and employees don't like it, the ones who do are at a competitive disadvantage, so it stays uncommon.

Which means the main effect of the law is to cause problems for the employers willing to do "second chance" hiring of people who might screw them over, which harms not only the employer but also those workers when employers stop being willing to hire them because the law requires them to take the hit if they do.

To put this into perspective, young children have an average amount of 16 colds per year (there's even a cool repo for incidence data, I suspect you could get more precise [1]). With an increasing number of parents both being in the labor market, and with childcare facilities increasingly (and rightfully IMO) refusing to take in sick kids, this means that parents need to take their own sick days to care for them.

It's difficult to do a back of the napkin calculation, but you can easily see how 16 colds x 3 days / 2 parents leads to 24 excess sick days for parents per kid (discounting for some overlap when multiple kids are sick) over the first few years.

[1] https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/GrippeWeb_Daten_des_...

Immigrants and expats. My colleague from India, who lives and works with me in the Netherlands, calls in sick at least once per month.

Clearly it was appreciated, but not by bureaucrats.

Do people consult doctors to obtain medical leaves shorter than a week? It seems like a waste of time for everybody involved. Either the problem is bad enough that you need time off and you might as well round it up to a week, or the problem is benign enough that you don't need time off at all.

I can relate to the attitude, but I also suspect it's a lot easier to live like this in one of the two richest countries in the world with the least stressful labor markets (going by the experience of my friends who emigrated there).

What’s the insurance setup like in norway? In germany at least, your insurance pays for (at least part) of this time, and since its mandatory to pay it and hundreds of euros a month, I’m not in any way inclined to give up my precious family time (holidays) to save my insurer money. I have a hard time understanding how one would feel otherwise.

Also, generally, I can’t think of a time i had off work where something ultimately failed to be delivered because of it, I’ll typically put in some extra time etc when i’m back if a deadline is looming.

So who really loses?

So you go to work sick ?

Fehmarnbelttunnel is the better example because you can see the difference in legislation between Denmark and Germany. Denmark passes laws for projects of such importance while in Germany the project has to hop over every existing legislative hurdle that are great for preventing smaller projects going bad, but do cost extra time and money on a larger scale.

It's mostly cultural. In some countries like Germany, Sweden or Netherlands, it's normalized that if you wake up tired or hungover or have a sore throat, you just don't show up at work that day, but in others it's frowned up and your boomer parents and many peers will look at you like you're needlessly weak and avoiding your adult responsibilities by letting a little headache or sniff hold you back from your duties.

That's how you see Eastern Europe actually having much fewer sick days from work despite lower life expectancy and a less performant healthcare system than the west. The communist system and post-communist hardship from the economic collapse meant people had no chance but to work no matter what, if they wanted to eat that day. Not going to work because of a cold or headache or things like depression or burnout was unthinkable to the generation that grew up under those conditions and they perpetuated that mindset to Millennials too. Sick leave was only if something was falling off. That's why Eastern European immigrants who migrated west were so valued for their work ethic. Granted, now thanks to Gen-z things are changing for the better and are adopting the more nordic and ladi back mindset on work ethic.

yes. and driven by long term sicknesses like, for example, burnout, cancer, and work-related older age issues.

dropping phone-in sick calls will sure as hell end those /s

this whole package is driven by populist disinformation.