Cutting part time workers’ sick leave entitlements from the 10 days everyone currently gets to being pro-rated based on how much they work.
*** Also covid vaccines will apparently no longer be free for most people after this month.*** EDIT: this was circulating yesterday, but isn’t true so that’s good.
And this during the biggest covid wave in 18 months, where hospitals and schools are having to close or reduce capacity because so many staff are sick. What a bunch of ghouls.
The obvious solution that seems to be overlooked every time sick leave comes up, is to roll it up into ACC, and have sick leave paid out from there, instead of having employers fund it directly.
The sum of costs to employers and pay for employees would be unchanged, but it would eliminate the uncertainty on how many sick days your particular employees take, making life easier for businesses, and it would allow for sick leave to be taken right from day one in the job, making like easier for workers.
The UK has something like this, where you’re paid or part paid out of their National Insurance scheme (but payments still come through the employer).
How does it work when a business wants to provide more sick days or unlimited sick leave, as some do? Or would ACC have unlimited sick leave?
I think the reason we cap sick leave at the moment is because it is employer funded. It would be unreasonable to burden a business with paying for the long-term illness of someone just because they happened to be an employee when they got sick.
When ACC was first set up, the working group that put it together had actually recommended that non-inury sickness be covered as well, but it was not implemented because of the political situation of the time.
If we move the burden of supporting workers who become ill from individual employers, then I think it makes the argument for long-term or indefinite sick leave a lot more palatable.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see a proposal for this. If you’re gonna do it, the first step might not be to push all sick leave onto ACC but instead do something like continuous sick leave of more than 30 days is covered by ACC (perhaps under ACC rules, 80% of pay up to a cap I think is how it works). Basically make ACC for all long term sick leave not just accidents. It seems a reasonable starting point, and is an easier jump to covering all sick leave.
The benefit of this is you don’t have to mess with the current employer funded system yet, you can leave it in place for the time being while still having better support for people who get cancer or whatever.
I’m not sure what this would do to ACC levies, but it would be interesting to at least see it calculated and considered.
They would have to cap ACC sick leave though or you would end up with people like me on the books, and 80% of my former salary, or anyone’ really, is a lot more than 50% of minimum wage.
I guess if it was built into ACC levies as well it would work though.
You could probably adjust the levys, but maybe you wouldn’t do 80% initially. But if you did, you’d probably disrupt the income protection insurance industry. I wouldn’t mind paying higher ACC levy’s and not having to pay income protection insurance.
What you could do to avoid too much disruption is adjust the levies and then cover everyone for a percentage but with max and mins.
The people who have income protection probably have a large overlap with those who have health insurance. They tend to be higher income, so if the cap were low, they would still need income protection insurance.
That way people who are in new jobs, and casual contract workers, are still covered.
Yes that would be a more palatable way to do it. If it can replace benefits for some people the savings could be fed into the scheme as well, to limit the levy increase.
That’s a good point. I think long term it could even save money. So many people go into work with a bad back or whatever and damage themselves much worse.
Aaah that’s so interesting. Would have been a radically different system.
It’s quite an interesting idea actually, one issue I can think of is employers encouraging employees to pull a sickie, instead of taking leave, as sick days aren’t a cost to them.
That’s a possibility, but I think with some degree of oversight, and checking up on businesses with significantly above average leave rates, it could be avoided. A lower amount of leave taken is generally indicative of a healthier workplace, so perhaps there might be an incentive system where companies get reductions in their levies for low rates of sick leave… although that just turns the problem you described on it’s head…
That’s fraud though so it would probably be the same employers who commit other kinds of fraud.