Mandatory Sick Days in the Public Sector?

[Spanner Island]

Actually going by the definition of wealth creation used by some here some of the PS generate wealth. If we count ESB and bord gas as public they generate massive profits. We generate profits in the fire service by charging for turnouts (which is a bloody disgrace as far as I'm concerned).
My view is that wealth is really only generated by the export and mining industry as the rest is just cycling money already in existence around the place. The service industries do not create wealth. They simply buy and sell from each other.

I find it amusing that a 3 year old thread can continue without any changes in between. I will admit that I failed to notice the date on the first few pages. Only the names of some of the posters made me realise this was an old thread.

Spanner you asked what my t&c's are. I am entitled to 7 uncertified sick days a year. Usually if you take more than 5 you are pulled up and asked "if everything's okay!" ahem!

The U/S system was introduced to reduce sick. The idea being that if you went and got a cert your doc would let you off for a week whereas if you needed a day ( for whatever reason) you went US. It worked. Unfortunatly some people abused the system. There has been major clampdowns on it since about 2005 in our job ( Dublin city council).

I'm not sure what the certified sick is (thankfully I've not had to avail of them). I do know if you go accident sick due to injury on duty you are entitled to full pay for 6 months and then you go on social welfare sick pay etc.

A recent article in the indo talked about local authority sick time and blared about the huge sick time. Right at the end they quote a county manager who pointed out that actually the long term sick of a few individuals made up the bulk and in fact the vast majority had not taken a single day. Of course the headline did not say that. Surprise surprise.

Cheers for clarification firefly. So 'mandatory' sick leave doesn't exist where you work... and O'Leary is telling porkies?

I suspected as much... and hope this is the case throughout the PS, although you're the only poster who's bothered to clarify.

[Spanner Island]

Anyone who wants to know the terms and conditions of employment of public servants should love at the government website or google circular 10/71 - this is the t and c for officer grades in the public service. Also you can go onto the HSE website and look at the terms and conditions of employment there. In black and white for all to see.
So to the topic of this thread Michael O'Learys comments about "mandatory sick days". As you will see fromt he terms and conditions there is no madatory sick days. Officer grades "may" take up to 7 days uncertified sick leave in a year, they can only take a max of 2 in a row or they will need a cert. Non officer grades have a similar scheme. Payment for this sick leave is at the discretion of the employer. It has been a few years since I took any sick leave and when I did it was certified by the doctor. Like every workplace there are some people who will misuse the scheme but the vast majority of people only phone in sick when they are sick. A lot of staff are not actually replaced if they are off so if you take a sick day then you will still have to do the work!
Sick leave statisitics - "lies, lies and damned statistics" - the difficulty with looking at statisitics is that they can be schewed. For example you could have a department showing that on average everyone took ten days sick leave in a year - but if that dept had one or two people on long term sick leave this would schew the figures - they may in fact be the only people in the dept taking sick leave but what happens is that the sick leave is taken and divided amont the number int he dept to get an average.
It makes me mad when things like this are misquoted and given credence when the facts are actually available on the government websites.

Cheers for that...

[stakerwallace]

Cheers for clarification firefly. So 'mandatory' sick leave doesn't exist where you work... and O'Leary is telling porkies?

I suspected as much... and hope this is the case throughout the PS, although you're the only poster who's bothered to clarify.

Honestly, as a former PS worker I can't tell you the terms, as I wasn't interested in taking 'sickies.' By and large, my experience was of a tiny, tiny number of takers overdoing so and the vast majority taking none at all or the bare minimum when they were actually quite sick. That was in one sector of the PS and so I can't generalise.