Germany's receding economy blamed on workers taking sick days off, companies hire 'detectives' to spy on sick employees.
Lesson in media literacy #4
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The premise of this article from the Inquirer (through Agence France Press) seems completely dystopian. There’s sick leave detectives now? Do they spy through your windows to make sure you’re coughing up enough phlegm to warrant taking a day off?
The article doesn’t focus a lot on this cop’s business though (and he is a cop, and doesn’t seem to see what he does as a bad thing). Actually, it’s only using the detective’s business as a way to admonish workers for daring to be sick or — god forbid — taking a day off to unwind the mental load when they already work 5 days a week, 250 days a year, in Germany’s case.
The article thus highlights a very worrying problem for us workers. It’s also worrying for our employers, but because they have the power, they get to offset the cost of their own machinations onto us.
It also reminds us all too much of the more and more common corporate overreach into our lives. The vast majority of us are neither employers nor tools of employers like this detective, but the workers that take sick days.
Germany holds the record for owning Europe’s highest GDP — and not just in the European Union, but the entirety of the continent. German workers work 40 hours a week, five days a week, with 20 vacation days a year plus public holidays (nine days on average). On top of this, German workers are among the most productive in Europe and even in the world — calculated as value added per hours worked.
Despite these achievements, the Inquirer — taking the article from AFP — bemoans the fact that “rates of absenteeism at work due to illness shaved 0.8 percent off Germany’s output in 2023 — helping push the economy into a 0.3 percent contraction.”
In other words, it’s blaming workers for the recession as if we had any say about how the economy is handled. The measly 0.8 percent GDP contraction is apparently enough to completely destroy everything else Germany achieves — its high GDP and productivity output — if we believe these journalists.
If a 0.8% contraction is enough to send capitalists worrying and sending “detectives” after you to make sure you’re actually sick when you say you are, then maybe the problem is not the workers but the system. In fact, the detective admits most companies pay a lot of money for his services and might even make a loss on it, but they do it because they have workers that often take sick days and they want to get rid of them.
In other words, if you have a disability, if you have a sudden illness such as cancer or a stroke — that can happen without prior warning — your employer doesn’t want to take care of you. They will try to get rid of you even if it costs them more money to do so. The point isn’t really to save money or be productive, the point is to scare you into compliance so you can toil away more hours at your desk and make more money for your boss.
Instead of looking at the systematic reasons for why people take sick days off, capitalists prefer to take the quick and dirty solution and just offload you to someone else so that you’re not their problem anymore.
People take sick days for a variety of reasons — the most obvious one being that they’re sick and shouldn’t come in to work and spread their virus around the floor (while the CEO will be safe in his individual office). The ‘detective’ himself states that the most common reason he’s seen for sick days is that people work on their own projects during these days — which doesn’t preclude them from actually being sick at the same time. Notably, the ‘detective’ notes that these projects are often side businesses. At no point does the article ask why people are opening side businesses while being employed full-time.
It is absolutely possible to do some light work while sick. It’s possible to monitor your social media, take note of tasks you will need to get to later, wipe down the counter, and maybe even reply to an email or two in the day.
What’s more difficult is attending meeting after meeting, deep scrubbing the fryer, being available right then and there for whatever will make the place appear busy, load the pallets into the truck, getting chewed out over not being able to keep up with the never-ending urgency due to being sick, interact with customers,
Many companies are slow to update and consider you their property while present at work (and they’re not wrong, this is technically what happens). Thus if you show up, you can expect to be treated as if you weren’t sick. In these conditions, the only reasonable decision is to not show up while you’re sick — why should workers pay for the bad decisions of companies? If the company is unable to provide an environment for sick employees, then these employees will find other means of getting what they need.
But there is a contradiction. In OECD countries, which Germany is part of, we are on average 2 to 3 times more productive today than we were in 1970.
And yet, we work the same amount of hours as our grandparents did back then, for almost the same pay (adjusted for inflation and cost of living).
The question arises: where is all this value going? If it was redistributed as working hours, then we would be working 20 hours a week — full time, for the same pay. Alternatively, you would be making twice what you currently are and keep your hours.
This is the question capitalists don’t want answered because the value we generate today in a digitalized and productive economy goes to them, and we see only a fraction of it. The contradiction is that we produce more, and yet we still work the same hours as before. Technology is supposed to free us from labor, but in capitalism it ends up chaining us to our desks.
The contradiction of capitalism is that we notice crumbling infrastructure around us, stagnant wages and our peers getting more anxious with a general sense of unease. And yet there’s never any money to fix any of that — the hospitals, the schools, the trains, the roads, unemployment. But then there’s always magically money for Ukraine or “Israel”.
Anyone who has worked an office job knows that they spend maybe half the day actually working. This isn’t a criticism; it’s our radical right of autonomy as workers in the 21st century. The other half is spent chatting with colleagues, taking a ninth coffee break, doing the rounds — basically appearing busy or keeping oneself busy through mindless tasks such as reorganizing the shelves or planning a meeting to plan another meeting.
Conversely, we are so much more busy. We do things much faster than we did in 1970 and paradoxically, we simply don’t have time to take the time anymore. There’s no time to simply wait around for a phone call these days: it comes in an email instead, and whereas you could only be on one line at a time in the past, emails potentially never stop pouring in. You can’t take a small break from drawing architectural plans or having to drive to the library to find a law book. The espresso machine makes a cup in 30 seconds, it doesn’t take 15 minutes to heat up the water anymore. You’re expected to open up Google and find the information in a minute. This, supposedly, frees you up for more “productive” tasks — something AI enthusiasts have been saying a lot since chatGPT came out in 2022.
What is notably absent from this speech is freeing up more of our time. On the contrary, it seems we work longer and longer. We barely have any time for house chores anymore — a very important form of labor — instead delaying them until the weekend, turning what was first envisioned to be leisure time into another work day, but one that is unpaid.
A 0.3% contraction in GDP means 0.3% less added value was produced in Germany in 2024 compared to 2023. This measly little number is already strong enough to send the brave risk-taking capitalists flying to the wall trying to desperately turn that into even a 0.1% growth figure. Any growth is good; recessions, on the other hand, are bad for capitalism. Growth must be infinite.
It doesn’t seem like such a great system to me if that tiny contraction can send us into a crisis, which seem to happen every decade.
At the most basic level, if we took let’s say the most primitive form of capitalism as it existed at its inception in the late 1700s, we only need to be paid just enough to survive — meaning providing ourselves clothes, food and shelter. Anything above that is a bonus meant to keep us pacified and happy to go to work, and it works. Many people enter some industries such as finance or banking solely for the paycheck.
But what happens when a worker dies? They get replaced by someone else the next day. Nowadays due to production requiring more and more educated workers, it can certainly be difficult to find a replacement in some jobs. Difficult, but not impossible. They’ll manage.
This is the great discovery of capitalism over previous systems. No longer was the boss responsible for keeping his workers directly alive; he just needs to provide them with a wage barely high enough to survive and come to work the next day. If one worker died, there were hundreds lining up to take their place: the unemployed form the ‘reserve army of labor’, a large pool of workers from which capitalists can quickly pick when they need someone to work for them.
The Inquirer is very candid in its worldview. At no point in their piece do they show concern for what this detective is doing to workers (getting them fired and entering the welfare system), nor do they worry about what a recession means for our quality of life. The point of their article is not to teach or enlighten, but to scare us. If you take a sick day, the detective is going to find out and get you fired, so watch out!
This is doubly threatening if we remember that concepts such as sick days, weekends, the 8 hour day or vacation days (also called PTO) were introduced not by the mercy of capitalists, but by striking and rioting workers who demanded better conditions, on par with the conditions their bosses were enjoying. Point to any country in the world and you will find a bloody struggle that led to their current labor laws.
Sick days were snatched through struggle, they didn’t come from the generosity of bosses who thought it was their civil duty to ensure diseases don’t spread. The COVID pandemic showed us exactly that: our rulers wanted us back to work as soon as possible, and companies put a stop to remote work right after. Afterwards, we pretended COVID never happened and is not a problem anymore — yet it’s a virus we now have to live with, and one that is not seasonal like the flu or the cold.
If capitalists had their way, they would undo all of those protections our ancestors fought for and won that we enjoy today. They don’t need to give us any sick days or PTO so long as we don’t fight for it. This is empirically backed up by the vast history of labor struggles around the world.
Under the ideology of infinite growth, capitalists believe that humans can work infinitely as well. In their twisted view of the world, increasing daily hours from 8 to 12 means a 50% increase in productivity; it’s so simple! And yet, studies show that decreasing work hours actually makes people more productive. It gives us time to think about the problems we have to solve, and work in short but efficient bursts. Once your creativity or mental energy is exhausted, it’s not coming back for the rest of the day. Working 8 hours a day (or more!) looks good on paper, but that’s about all it does.
This article from the Inquirer is but one of many that attempts to pit worker against worker. Some choice quotes:
“The impact is significant and certainly affects economic activity,” Claus Michelsen, chief economist at the German association of research-based pharmaceutical companies, told AFP.
But why is it significant? What is the solution? What can companies do different so that people don’t feel like taking sick days? None of this is answered. It just is a problem. Trust us.
Mercedes-Benz chief executive Ola Kallenius [laments] that “absenteeism in Germany is sometimes twice as high as in other European countries”.
But again, why is that the case? Why is a group as big as Mercedes-Benz able to mass-produce cars worldwide, but not find out why their employees are taking time off? How is the chief executive for the Mercedes-Benz group able to categorically say there is an absenteeism problem, what led them to this conclusion? This is not challenged by the Inquirer.
In fact, employers talk a lot about absenteeism, but I propose that we don’t talk enough about presenteeism — the practice of showing up to work for no reason other than being contractually obligated to clock in. Why is the responsibility of the employer solely limited to providing a paycheck, when we provide our labor? Why is it not part of their contractual obligations to provide social benefits, when we are expected to work through sickness and personal hardship?
These are the kinds of questions employers hate hearing us ask, because they very quickly lead to one ultimate answer: capitalists don’t want to provide anything beyond what they’re legally obligated to because it cuts into their profits and isn’t their problem. When we start to organize and unionize like our forefathers did to agitate for better work conditions, that is the only time capitalists will make concessions to safeguard their power over us.
Presenteeism is not a wholly new word, but it’s interesting that established definitions once again put the blame on the worker. Presenteeism is often presented as something a worker does willingly, because they’re so devoted to the job or need to keep up appearances (such as not leaving before the boss does). No — we show up to work because we get fired if we don’t. This is the factor that all those managers studying presenteeism refuse to see and mention, because it immediately exposes the unbalanced nature of employment in capitalism. As workers, we don’t get a say in our employment or lack thereof. Employers can dangle employment in front of us at any time and then fire us from these jobs at any time. And in each case, all they say we can do is be grateful for the opportunity.
We are imbued with ideas of liberty, democracy and individuality from our earliest age, but somehow all these ideals don’t make it to the workplace. The workplace — the place where we spend a third of our life and which keeps society running — is somehow immune from having to negotiate with its employees but can instead impose whichever conditions it likes on them. And we’re supposed to accept this.
In-between these very concerned CEOs gracing us with their opinion on the matter of personal health (no doubt they can afford to see a doctor whenever they want to), we get some alarming data:
According to OECD data, Germans missed on average 6.8 percent of their working hours in 2023 due to illness — worse than other EU countries such as France, Italy and Spain.
This comes out to half an hour per day, or the length of a lunch break. Are we going to forbid lunch breaks next? Is this what’s going to save the economy, or can we admit the problems are deeper and structural?
Other points of data paint a bleak picture (this is sarcasm). “Workers in Germany,” it is said, “on average took 15.1 days of sick leave last year [2023] up from 11.1 days in 2021, according to federal statistics agency Destatis.”
4 extra days off out of the 250 German workers work every year comes out to a 1.57% portion of the total. Out of the days not worked, this adds 3.48% days to that sum.
Is capitalism really so bad at creating value that a 1% decrease anywhere is enough to be cause for concern, or are we ready to admit that our bosses would work us to death if they could and replace us with our children when we drop dead?
In the name of impartiality though, the Inquirer quickly asks actual experts (and not bosses worrying about their bottom line) for their analysis. Hidden beneath the email signup form on the original article, the problems, experts say, are things such as more stressful work conditions, increasing respiratory ailments [they mean COVID] and fraying social protections. The article doesn’t expand on what these protections are specifically nor on what companies can do to reduce these and ends there.
I trust I’ve done this job of expanding on the fraying social protections for them.
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We're human capital. Corporations are predatory entities and they need to die.