Ever struggled into work when you are feeling under the weather? Most of us have done this if we’ve had a big deadline to meet, or were worried about letting colleagues down, or if the boss has been cracking down on people “throwing a sickie”. You might even just go in because you are lucky enough to enjoy your job and don’t mind sharing your head cold with your co-workers. Whatever the reason, it is now clear that “presenteeism” is a real phenomenon.
This week’s BBC Inside Out programme revealed the darker side of alleged presenteeism at the Shirebrook warehouse run by Sports Direct in Derbyshire. It was claimed that there had been an unusually high number of call-outs to the East Midlands Ambulance Service to the site in the last two years.
The site employs close to 3,500 agency workers, many from Eastern Europe. The programme suggested that the “six strikes” policy used by one of the companies providing agency workers to the warehouse was punishing sickness absence and encouraging workers with serious health issues to go to work when they really needed medical attention. After six “strikes”, triggered by sick days, excessive chatting or poor timekeeping, a worker’s contract can be terminated.
Having been interviewed by the BBC for the programme, I was able to take a look at some of the documentary evidence they had collected. What I saw raised three main concerns that need to be addressed with some urgency.
First, we need much more clarity about what should be done when a “cluster” or pattern of illness or injury appears in one workplace. In many cases, responsibility for investigating such cases falls to local authority environmental health teams rather than the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
It’s not clear to me that the skills needed to conduct inspections of food hygiene standards in local burger bars overlap too much with the ability to highlight systemic failures to assess and mitigate physical or, more specifically, psychosocial risks in a complex workplace. While the details of the Shirebrook case have now been passed to the HSE, it is by no means clear that they would have taken an interest but for the BBC programme.
Second, employers need to stop treating sickness absence as an aberrant behaviour committed by “malingering” employees. During the recent recession we saw sickness absence rates tumble as job insecurity rocketed. At the same time presenteeism also rose steeply. In some parts of the public sector, sickness absence records are still used to select people for redundancy – directly incentivising people with ill-health to go to work when they are ill.
There is clear evidence that such draconian management practices, in extreme cases, can unwittingly cause people with serious ailments to avoid seeking treatment and exposing themselves to a higher risk of an acute episode such as a stroke, heart attack or extreme psychological distress at work. These Darwinist management practices can encourage presenteeism and can drive serious ill-health problems underground.
Third, we need to challenge the view that all employers need to do is discharge their basic legal duty of care towards employees. In its response to the BBC Inside Out programme Sports Direct said that it “aims” to meet its legal obligations to employees and their health and safety at work. Well, having compliance with the law as an aspiration is not adequate if you want to avoid comparison with some of the worst businesses for worker rights and safety such as those in the Bangladeshi garment industry.
For example, how many UK employers conduct a regular psychosocial risk assessment of their workplaces (looking at sources of workplace stress, bullying and harassment) as required by the 1974 Act and subsequent regulations? My guess is that very few even know that they have to.
Aside from this, isn’t there a moral duty both to protect employees from avoidable hazards and to prevent management practices aimed at driving efficiency, high performance and compliance that incentivise cutting corners, “gaming” the system or, in the most extreme circumstances, endangering employee health out of fear of punishment or dismissal?
Amid the debate we are having in the UK about the casualisation of work, the rise of insecure and precarious employment contracts and the ease with which some employers feel able to transfer business risks to their workforces, it’s worth remembering – shock horror – that working people are sometimes genuinely ill.
In fact, about a quarter of the workforce have reported having a longstanding illness that will occasionally affect their ability to attend work and this proportion will rise as people age and continue working until 68. Most enlightened employers get this and, strangely, it does not seem to reduce their profits or spook their shareholders.
