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During the pandemic, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested that Britons should be like the Germans when it comes to getting sick: “We have a habit of going back to work or going to work when we are not feeling well.” Angry experts were quick to point out why: the UK's sick pay policy was stingy by international standards, while Germany's was one of the most generous in the world.
A few years later, the two countries find themselves at an interesting juncture: the UK's new Labor government intends to increase the generosity of the country's sick pay policy, while Germany is starting to worry that its policy is, in fact, too generous by half. .
If you're relying on statutory sick pay in the UK, you won't currently receive any pay for the first three days you feel sick (although Labor is planning to introduce sick pay from day one). You would then receive a fixed sum of £116.75 per week – just 16 percent of the average weekly earnings of full-time employees. In Germany, you receive 100% of your salary from the first day of illness for up to six weeks.
Is this a luxury that Germany can no longer afford? Sickness absence rates – already high by international standards – appear to have occurred It increased sharplyThis is based on data from health insurance companies. International data from the OECD and WHO, although somewhat uneven, indicate that German workers now take more than 20 sick days a year. (In contrast, the British took almost 6 days in 2022, the most recent data available for the UK.)
There are a number of explanations for the increase in Germany, including more respiratory illnesses, post-pandemic mental health issues (a common factor in other countries) and extreme fatigue. Child care sector This means that nurseries can close due to staff illness at short notice, negatively impacting parents' ability to work.
some Employers I suspect the pandemic-era change that made it easier to get a sick note from a doctor (you can now get one over the phone) has led to more evasion, too. But Nicholas Ziebarth of the ZEW-Leibniz Center for European Economic Research, an expert on sick leave policies, told me he thinks The biggest factor It is an efficient new system that automatically transmits sick notes from doctors to health insurance companies, instead of relying on scraps of paper. If this is true, this suggests that absences were recorded less frequently than before.
Either way, you can see why German employers might be unhappy with high rates of sickness absence, especially at a time when some fear the country's entire economic model is under threat.
One obvious response is to reduce the generosity of the benefit. In Sweden, for example, employees receive 80 percent of their salaries during the first two weeks of illness. The data suggests that this will be effective. Ziebarth says there's a strong correlation between the generosity of a state's sick pay system and the number of absences per worker.
But there are two dangers. The first is that by imposing a financial cost on illness, it is likely to discourage some avoiders but may also motivate people to go to work when they are unwell. This has costs in itself, from slowing the speed of their recovery to spreading infectious diseases to other workers. In the first year of the epidemic… Half of all OECD countries They began or expanded sick pay systems, such as making them payable from day one – a tacit admission that their policies were insufficient to motivate people to stay home when sick. This is one of the main reasons why the UK Government is now planning to make sick pay payable from day one.
Hence an “optimal” policy from an economic point of view would set generosity at a level that minimizes evasion, but also minimizes the number of people who go to work when they are sick. But there is not enough data about who is really sick and who is not in order to know.
There is also the problem of fairness: once you cut sick pay below 100%, you are penalizing people who are unlucky enough to get sick, especially those with chronic illnesses. In the UK, I wonder if this is one explanation for the higher number of people Who don't work And Claim Health-Related Benefits Instead: If you have a long-term condition and holding on to your job is so painful because you lose most of your paycheck every time you feel too sick to continue working, that may be an incentive to leave work for good.
What is the right balance between the British and German systems? Unfortunately, there are no simple answers that can be converged upon, only trade-offs that must be weighed.
