Who works the most days of all?
The local newspapers are having a field day with some recent statistics from local civil services, including schools and bureacrats, in terms of the number of days of absenteeism that can be quoted. After all, those slackers don’t work hard enough to ever get sick, right?
I have to look at this from the other side of the mirror. I’ve been a teacher, and I work as a bureaucrat in the education sector. I really wish that there was a little more truth in the reporting.
Let’s start with teachers. Their contract is for 200 days. They do not get “the whole summer off”, unless being unpaid counts. The long break at Christmas fits into the terms of the contract; it is not paid time. You go to university for longer than most, and then you are paid roughly the same as a garbage truck driver. The choice of your employer to pay your salary in terms of two hundred days is an exercise in creative accounting.
The sick time available to me, seven days per year, is hardly outrageous. I am paid for my sick days, as are many other segments of the working society, and the negotiations that have led to fractionally more than one day of sick time per two months of work are not freebies. I was placed in the uncomfortable position last year of needing a minor surgery that saw me “off” for three weeks. After the seven days of sick time, I fell into employment insurance which reduced my pay. As well, I spent the rest of the year with no sick time available… a great incentive to healthy behaviour.
I wish that the newspapers would try to tell the whole story. Teachers and others in the education sector are not swimming in cash; we don’t get any more vacation time than other sectors of the economy, and when we are out, we have to provide both planned work for the replacement, as well as followup. Nothing easy there.
