The days of 'taking a sickie' are well and truly over

Of course if your work requires you to be on site and partake in physical activity you can be ‘off sick’. You can take the day off to recover.

This is how it should be.

But what if you can work remotely? What if all you need to work is WiFi? If you could work from home during the lockdown what is stopping you doing it now?

A major change in the past two years is the realisation that you can only take a day off if you have booked a holiday.

If you have the sniffles and a slight cold that has forced you to stay home from the office - it does not matter, you can still work from home.

Remember when they used to count your sick days? A fair few employees will now have a clean sick record.

I would go as far as to say in some cases the only time you can be sick is if you cannot physically operate a laptop. To be in this state you would need to be in hospital or be in such a state a family member will have to call your employer on your behalf to tell the boss you are at ‘death’s door’.

The term ‘throwing a sickie’ is a thing of the past for some workers. If you can type and punch some numbers in, then you can work.

I heard in some cases employers are ensuring that the laptop is taken home each and every night in case ‘you have to isolate’.

Then again, you could work for the DVLA. This week it emerged that hundreds of DVLA staff were sent home on full pay during the pandemic without having to work at all.

It is said 3,400 of the government agency’s 6,200 staff were at home during the first lockdown in 2020. It meant a huge backlog of backlog of licence applications and renewals.

Let’s just say they weren’t the only organisation doing this.

Clearly, this can’t be representative of the whole of the DVLA but it does show that in the past two years two things have happened. On the one side you have employers taking advantage of the fact that no-one can be off sick and then we have others milking Covid isolation periods.