Techie sacked after jetting to tropical island on sick leave To China now, where a tech worker learned the hard way that a) you don't book a holiday before you have time off confirmed, and b) you definitely don't then take sick leave and go on holiday anyway. According to National Business Daily, the worker, named only as Xu, was sacked by his unidentified Beijing-based employer because …
You could try, but if they go on that basis, they can then ask you to prove or at least state that you were not there. I'm not sure how Chinese judges would view the situation, but it would normally be fine to ask someone "Did you go to Hainan during that time or not", and being dishonest on that question would not help.
"Even China seems to have better labor laws than the US!"
I would guess prima facie about the same except with CN you have the full force of a corrupt coercive state and opaque abitrary judicial system against you. Actually scratch the except.
If the employer were required to pay a ballooning compensation benefit to the employee after 18 months without leave taken (say an extra 5% compounded for every week: 13 weeks = 1.9x, 26 weeks = x3.5 ;) and also payable on termination then employees taking regular leave might become a thing.
Imagine that you're the coworker who has to work long hours because this guy is sick and work needs to be done urgently. Then you see him clearly not being sick, having dropped all his work onto you. How would you feel then? I can't guarantee that something like that happened, but I'm puzzled why you think coworkers should support someone else's lies, even when such a situation could be making things worse for that coworker. I don't tend to mess with my colleagues if they choose to do something like this, but nor would I lie on their behalf.
There is an alternative as well. What if the colleague mentioned Xu's presence without knowing it was disallowed, as in "I ran into Xu yesterday. I didn't know he had been sent to Hainan", and that tipped off the company? It doesn't have to be deliberate.
Imagine that you're the coworker who has to work long hours because this guy is sick and work needs to be done urgently. Then you see him clearly not being sick, having dropped all his work onto you. How would you feel then?
Fair question, it's indeed a shitty thing to do. Although, in this case the coworker who ratted him out was also in Hainan, so is unlikely to have been picking up the slack.
Went to India once, on my return I spent 10 days in the Maldives. Got a bug, went to the local clinic and got a medical certificate. When I got home I applied for sick leave during annual leave (yes, perfectly acceptable where I worked). Got my 10 days annual leave re-credited in lieu of sick leave. Therefore: on paid sick leave while in the Maldives.
As an aside, I put in a travel insurance claim and was re-credited the Maldives portion of my costs. So, on paid sick leave and staying free in the Maldives.
> When I got home I applied for sick leave during annual leave (yes, perfectly acceptable where I worked). Got my 10 days annual leave re-credited in lieu of sick leave
ISTR that is the law in the UK, even though most companies will try to tell you otherwise.
US law doesn't guarantee anything, and employer policies differ:
My former employer would say that if I could produce a note, I would merely have to adjust it in the online timecard system and boom got my vacay hours back. (They never documented how fast you earned sick time, or how to check, so I assumed I had plenty, but I rarely used it.)
For my current employer, vacay time and sick time come from the same bucket, so no improvement.
Icon, meh -->
Most companies treat it as "you can have this many days off to illness before we start to ask questions".
Mind you, my first boss had grown up in New Zealand and told me about the concept of "duvet days". That's when you really want to pull a sickie, but instead of lying to your employer, you just tell them you're having a duvet day, and stay at home.
Sick leave is for those occasions where you are ill. So instead of coughing up whatever bug you picked up from your child all over your colleagues in the office, you stay home until the damn thing is gone. Anything over 3-5 days here will need a medical cert from your doctor saying that you were in fact ill, whereas anything under that is taken on good will that you had a short bug (like food poisoning for instance) and it won't need specifically medical certification. What you *are* required to do though is inform your boss when you are ill as soon as you can (email, calling into the office, whichever). You still get paid your full salary for those couple of days. The allowance is reasonably set that if you have a couple of colds, you don't lose pay.
Long term sick leave, so usually something that stretches into months, you'll probably drop to statutory sick pay (which in the UK is a lot less than what other European countries get). After all, the chances that you have a family to feed and a roof over your head to pay for are higher than zero.
While you Americans have to take these kinds of things out of your PTO (personal time off, or fancy talk for holiday), Europe and other countries consider it to be a generally good deal to offer sick leave because it makes you more productive and more likely to stay at the job you're at. You will get people taking the absolute mickey in a small percentage of instances (like claiming sick leave but going on holiday, like this bloke did, or claiming to be injured and then being seen walking around without any injuries), but they usually get found out eventually or HR starts doing something about it.
I'm the AC you're replying to. I'm in the UK, too.
I meant the concept of having allocated a certain number of "sick leave" days.. What happens in such a country if you are sick more often than that? I presume it counts as leave. What if you have no leave left?
Also, if you are not ill all year, do you get to carry those sick days forward, so you can bank them for "the big one"? or do they get converted into pay/leave?
Or do you have to make yourself purposely sick to use them up? :-)
PS, Not my downvote.
Different AC here, from USA.
Answer to first paragraph questions: Depends on employment contract. Sometimes sick more often than that, just means "unpaid leave", other times you have to go full bore and use the FMLA which requires companies to provide unpaid leave for a certain length of time without firing you for it.
Second: Sick days usually don't carry forward. Vacation time sometimes does, up to a point defined in emp agreement. You don't usually get to convert into pay until you retire, and there may be a maximum amount you can get.
Third: Many companies don't ask for a reason for sick time, especially big ones who have been sued for discrimination against the disabled.
In general US labor laws are much friendlier to the company than they are to the employee, and employment agreements can be extremely favorable to the company without actually being illegal.
Many have gone to one pool of paid time off, that gets used for whatever reason employee might have to take time off. Some allow other employees to donate their time off to another employee, which strikes me as pretty damn Orwellian/Dickensian.
Previous company, sick leave could be banked without limit, you got, I think 1+ days a month. I had about 90 days when I left. Not paid out when you leave. Vacation time was -27 days a year, one year's worth could be carried over, so you could have a max of 54 days, all paid out if you leave (state law).
Current company has "PTO" = merged sick and vacation time (25 days a year), only 25 days can be carried over to the next year, so a maximum of 50 days, all of which is paid out if you leave. Downside, of course, being that if you get something like COVID, you could find yourself without vacation time for a year. In reality, this is handled informally, by "working from home", depending on your supervisor, of course. A much worse deal for the employee than my previous company, IMHO.
I'm not sure we know the whole story here. Is it possible that the boss was "playing favourites" and giving other colleagues preference in getting leave? That might explain why there "weren't enough staff" on two occasions (and possibly why the initial tribunal sided with Xu).
Possibly, the "colleague" who spotted Xu in Hainan was one of those who had been given leave in preference.
In any case (having experienced a similar scenario, having leave rejected twice), I wouldn't want to work for a boss like that (or with colleagues like that either).
Anything is possible, but that's not a way we can make a lot of decisions. For example this part:
"Possibly, the "colleague" who spotted Xu in Hainan was one of those who had been given leave in preference."
Or possibly, the colleague who spotted him lived and worked in Hainan, which Xu did not, and was the colleague required to do the work Xu was supposed to do. Or perhaps the colleague in Hainan had traveled there for business purposes. Or both applied to take time off and both planned to go to Hainan, but the colleague had taken leave less recently and asked for it earlier. There are lots of reasons why that person could have been in Hainan. That can't be disproved any more than your possibility can, so it's hard to make an opinion based on what could have happened. However, what is not questioned is that Xu did apply for sick leave when not sick, which isn't generally allowed even if your boss is really annoying and denying leave requests.
"I'm not sure we know the whole story here. Is it possible that the boss was "playing favourites" and giving other colleagues preference in getting leave? That might explain why there "weren't enough staff" on two occasions (and possibly why the initial tribunal sided with Xu)."
or simply multiple people asked for the same period off before him and were granted and by the time Xu asked there was insufficient people to cover.
I've had that happen in my team a few times, it is not nice to tell people that they can't take holiday when they want to but we always remind them to ask before booking anything just in case.
I find the "spotted by colleague" pronouncement very suss, I have visited Hainan; it isnt exactly small, and has at least two major airports (north and south), as well as high speed rail and ferry connections to the mainland.
So the chances of passing through the exact same terminal at the exact same time are VERY low.
It should be noted here that cervical spondylosis is a condition caused by wear and tear to the vertebrae and does not, as you may be forgiven for thinking, involve having a cervix. So the gentleman in the story was not quite as obviously pulling a sickie as it would appear at first glance.
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