Perpetuum Mobile: Because expressing the causes of an increasing burden of illness is fraught with a kind of taboo, employees are forced to accuse each other of making themselves sick too often.
Photo: unsplash/Abhishek Kirloskar
At Employers’ Day 2024 at the end of October, one of the 365 employers’ days of the year, FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr stated unequivocally: “The sick days are too many. Away from telephone sick leave and towards more personal responsibility! What, despite all its senselessness, sounds like victorious liberal self-persiflage is unfortunately a very precise threat. Under the given conditions, “personal responsibility” ultimately means obliging employees to take responsibility for those who own more than just their full or already damaged work capacity.
The current background is new records in sickness absence year after year, which are putting a strain on economic growth. Now the employees are implicitly accused of just playing tricks and using fundamentally sensible means such as sick leave over the telephone. Their responsibility is, if not to reduce the individual burden of illness – they are given fewer and fewer options for this – then at least to reduce the burden of illness on society. Little by little, even more pressure is being built up to go to work when sick, which can also be based on an already existing trend towards more “voluntary” presenteeism.
The proposal by the Federal Medical President Klaus Reinhardt to introduce part-time sick leave (hourly sick leave) is also a foretaste of this. Health Minister Lauterbach may have rejected the idea, but the gradual “reversal of citizens’ money” already prepared by the traffic light coalition (Paritätischer Gesamtverband) will probably also set the route for sick leave regulations in the longer term. In view of the CDU’s announcement that, if it takes over government, the complete abolition of citizens’ money will drive hundreds of thousands into hardship with no alternative, this is the more optimistic assumption.
The opposition party BSW also doesn’t need to hide in this regard thanks to its support of the cross-party opposition to humanity. As statistics show, the loss of productivity due to presenteeism is sometimes even higher than that caused by absenteeism, depending on the actual activity, company and industry. In any case, the instrumental rationality of measures that will promote the former does not necessarily lie in an immediate advantage for entrepreneurs, but rather in the additional discipline of wage earners.
Keeping job seekers or people with incapacity “at least” at the so-called socio-cultural subsistence level also means leaving them in just such a low level of absolute hardship that they are available as scapegoats for the misery of the employees, living in luxury.
A fetishization of one’s own performance that has not been seen for a long time will be able to keep pace with these developments. It is the best ideological barrier against the realization that this ability to perform is now directly transformed into the strength to work on the irreversibility of the climate catastrophe. If you have to fear homelessness, the future uninhabitability of the planet won’t be that important, that’s what common sense tells you. If the barrier in question has lasted long enough, even after it has been torn down, all that will remain is the pride of the wage earners in having contributed to the catastrophe.
Similar patterns could apply to restricting sick leave rights. The contempt for the sick, who are supposedly just making themselves comfortable, and the horror of knowing that they are being made more uncomfortable than ever can coexist. Legal changes will also be accompanied by increased control repression, as Tesla is already exemplifying in Brandenburg, directly from the companies. In other European countries the ideas are already more mature. The Salzburg Chamber of Commerce is calling for continued wage payments to be suspended on the first day of sick leave; in France, Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin presented plans to abolish the first three days of paid sick leave for civil servants, which particularly affects teachers who are relatively affected by illness due to their work situation; In Finland, continued payment of wages is also under attack.
Once all these floodgates are opened, they will be very difficult to close, even by possible left-wing governments. There is hardly anything that can be done against the ideological and material perpetuum mobile that poorer sick leave regulations make people sicker, which in turn makes tightening sick leave regulations appear to be society’s last resort.
So these attacks on health rights are easy. Those affected are running out of arguments and those making the decision are left with speculation, as exemplified here in a press release from the Frankfurt University for Applied Sciences: “Relevant studies point to a change in values in German society as another possible cause for the increased sickness rate. As Generation Z enters the workforce, it values private relationships and leisure activities, and loyalty to the employer is decreasing among all employees. In addition, the spread of home offices and the changing labor market make it easy for skilled workers to change jobs.
Because there is a kind of taboo about discussing the main social causes of an increasing burden of illness, employees are forced to accuse each other of getting sick too often or allowing themselves to get sick too easily. In any case, we don’t live in a society in which you don’t immediately feel guilty as soon as you ask yourself whether wage work fundamentally makes you sick.
Cancer research is also completely losing its focus on workplace-related risks and is now only looking for problems in individual behavior and genetic predisposition, as occupational health researcher Wolfgang Hien explains, for example. The fact that work, as it is organized, in the current situation – you don’t necessarily have to think in terms of capitalism, exploitation and wage labor – helps to destroy your own livelihood, is still diffusely entering the general consciousness.
The Basel sociologist Simon Schaupp shows this using the example of the Swiss construction workers, whom he interviewed in detail for his book “Metabolic Politics”. Part of the brutal, real irony is how this knowledge leads to an even closer emotional connection to wage work – the “execution of the objective growth compulsion by the subject” (Tomasz Konicz). Under the condition of hopelessness, the more courageous, proactive defense of wage labor is a reaction to one’s own feeling that one actually wants to attack this institution at its foundations. Any further intensification of work, any deterioration of conditions in the workplace will be justified by the fact that wage work, which at least guarantees their precarious right to exist, must be protected from the weakness of wage workers. That’s not really healthy.
Not only do the increased numbers of sick leave have their origins in the pandemic, but also the corresponding ideology formation. Yes, the Federal Republic’s Corona policy was authoritarian, among other things, because it sought to seemingly compensate for the lack of adequate health protection with too much repression. In large parts of society, health protection was ultimately identified with repression. It is therefore hardly on their agenda to complain about the higher burden of disease in the population because of anything other than just concerns about the location. This results in a calculation according to which getting sick means freedom due to a lack of protection, but calling in sick means a selfish attack on the common good.
In any case, we don’t live in a society in which you don’t immediately feel guilty as soon as you ask yourself whether wage work fundamentally makes you sick.
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