Coffee in hand, I switched on BBC News 24 today and was dismayed to see yet another cog in the NHS spin-job in motion.
According to the BBC News, the country is losing 175m working days each year due to sickness and our Health Secretary Alan Johnson (AKA Obersturmbannführer) is now setting out plans for changing what he calls “the sick-note culture” and plans to urge GPs to issue “well notes” setting out what tasks a worker can perform instead of certificates automatically signing them off.
According to the CIA’s World Fact Book, the UK has a total population of 60.7 million and a labour force of 30.7 million. The maths isn’t difficult and from these figures we can deduce that on average each working person takes off six working days each year as a result of sickness. Is this really so much?
It is about six years since I last worked in an office job and when I was doing that I was in constant fear of getting sick. When I got a cold or flu I’d try at all costs to be at work. I’d take my sickness into work and spread it around. Other people the office where I worked would get sick and they too would come into work sick. This was the norm and I suspect that it still is amongst office workers in the UK. If I did need to take days off sick I would usually take them as holidays as my boss simply didn’t tolerate sickness. I am self-employed now and have never looked back.
Once I got laryngitis and as my job involved being on the phone all day I was forced to take time off work to let my non-existent voice repair itself. After a few days, I was able to speak, allbeit in a whisper, so I returned to work and promptly lost my voice again answering the phones. I suggested that I be given other tasks but my greedy little shit of a boss didn’t care. He just let me loose my voice again and I had to take more days off as part of my holiday allowance. To add insult to injury when I had finally made a full recovery I was hauled into his office for a lecture about the inconvenience of taking holidays at short notice.
I suspect that my boss was not a special case and that this is the normal attitude of many businesses.
Alan Johnson has recently been trying to persuade GPs to open-up their surgeries in the evenings and at weekends to accommodate working people but GPs are having none of it and why should they? GPs and reception staff are people too. Why should they be forced to work out-of-hours if they don’t want to?
This attempt to shift blame onto the shoulders of those who are sick and those who work very hard in the NHS service curing the sick is frankly pathetic. Why isn’t Mr Johnson having a go at employers for their intolerance? Why isn’t he re-enforcing the idea of a “duty of care” that employers have for their employees? The rot starts here. Surely the idea that an employee can be treated as a social leper just for being sick should be unacceptable in any civilised society.
Workers in the UK get fewer bank holidays than their European counterparts and according to the BBC’s news website:-
Europe averages 11 bank holidays each year, compared to eight in England and Wales and 10 in Northern Ireland. Only the Netherlands has fewer public holidays than the UK, but Dutch workers have more annual leave.
In March 2005, Tony Blair pledged to ensure workers get bank holidays on top of paid leave if Labour wins the next general election. Does anyone believe that this will really be the case?
New Labour is quietly rolling out a “master-plan” to force genuinely sick people back to work by paying US companies like ATOS loads of money to “re-assess” disability claims. They are forcing doctors to break their Hippocratic oath of “doing no harm” by making them police their patients and effectively turning them into Agents of The State.
The fact is that UK workers have longer hours than other European workers for a lower standard of living. They are punished for being sick and have fewer holidays. Alan Johnson is just another New Labour toadie spouting crap. New Labour = Brave New Bullshit.
