Employers to Fund Sick Pay?

There continues to be a row over whether or not employers should pay for the rst four weeks of the employee’s sick leave. Social Protection Minister Joan Burton, who is under pressure from both the Department of Public Expenditure and the Troika to cut the €1 billion annual sick leave bill, rst muted this proposal in advance of the December 2011 budget, with strong opposition from employers, including the Irish Hardware & Building Materials Association.

However, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation, Richard Bruton, is opposing this move. He is on record as having said that the savings being sought by his colleague Minister Burton, could be achieved if the average number of sick days in the public sector could be reduced to those that already prevailed in the private sector, pointing out the disparity between the number of sick days taken by public sector employees as opposed to private sector workers.

By implication, this implies that the public sector does not match the private sector level of eciently. This also raises the question of the Croke Park agreement, and part of its remit towards savings. The main coalition parties seem to be at odds as to how it should be addressed. At least part of the problem has been the willingness of some doctors to write sickness certicates for patients. There has always been a suspicion that at least some of these certicates were not appropriate.

The IHBMA has written to Ministers Burton and Bruton outlining our members’ view point. Your association is of the opinion that if employees are unable to work due to sickness, then their sickness certicate should be signed, not as in the case at present, by their own doctor, but by a doctor nominated by their employers. This change could lead to a remarkable improvement in the health of some employees in both the public and private sectors. GP sick notes, where the GP acts as the gatekeeper, needs to be addressed in tandem with any new legislation. The role of the GP in this process needs to be monitored and systems put in place with co-responsibility between employers, medical authorities and government.

This major issue about how certs are issued, the availability of certs and the fact that it is open to abuse must be acknowledged by the medical profession and there needs to be on- going training for doctors on how to write sick/t notes and how to certify by category of work. A problem from a doctors perspective is that there is an issue of doctors/patient condentiality, where the doctor has a duty of care to their patient who is of course someone else’s employee. Doctors have a ‘cradle to grave’ perspective and currently in Ireland, there are approx. 16 million consultations a year with virtually no GP training in occupational health. A recent survey in the UK has indicated only 23% of GPs understood the current benets system there. At a recent seminar, Dame Carol Black, a UK expert advisor on health and work, emphasised the idea of a healthy workforce and there should be a move from the sick note culture to a t note culture.

She also emphasised the importance of the three stakeholders in the sickness system. They are the –

• State (worklessness benefits, foregone taxes and extra health care).
• Employers (cost of staff turnover, time spent managing absence, overtime or replacement when necessary)
• Individuals (emotional, physical cost of ill health and loss of income)

She went on to say “There would seem to be too few drivers to keep people at work. All the impetus seems to be to get from work to long term disability with very few drivers or incentives going the other way. There needs to be a positive action on behalf of the employer to get the employee back to work within the rst four weeks”. Information emanating from the UK says that the rst four weeks are critical, where there is a 90% chance of getting people to return to work and after 10 weeks only a 60% chance and so on.

The question that must be asked is, is the Minister for Social Protection trying to x the HSE sick note culture by imposing this on all employers? There needs to be a regulatory impact assessment on SMEs as regards direct and indirect costs. There also needs to be an understanding that companies need to manage absence separately to sick pay. A recent Forfas presentation stated that the country should be careful from a cost competitiveness focus, especially what the government’s savings would be. Forfas also asked what the cost implications would be for employers to self- insure against absenteeism. What impact will it have on tax take and what change of behaviour is likely in the public and private sectors. The IHBMA believe that other such schemes should be looked at internationally to gauge whether they have actually worked at reducing absenteeism. Employers already know that they are paying for absenteeism through their PRSI social insurance and are questioning whether this exercise by Minister Burton is an exercise in social engineering. Is it the function of employers to shift burdens from one sector to another? The IHBMA will continue to lobby and support Minister Richard Bruton's position that this proposal will involve a substantial nancial and compliance cost on SMEs, without any obvious gain.

Source: HortiTrends News Desk