YOU can set your clock by it. No feast is less moveable. Every December, a week before Christmas, invariably on a Monday, I will fall sick. Bank on it. There are reasons why this annual event is so predictable. I’m self-employed and have been for over 20 years. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. And on top of that, a lot of the work I do is predicated on me actually being there; it’s not like Jagjit from accounts can cover for me while I sleep off a hangover.
I mention this because Monday is National Sickie Day (as opposed to National Sikhi Day, which astonishingly has yet to be allotted). Traditionally the first Monday of February will see peak absenteeism brought on by the post-Christmas slump, the biting cold weather and the next bank holiday is almost two months away. This year, Sickie Day is expected to be the worst/best ever; it falls the day after Superbowl Sunday, the first weekend after dry January and just after payday.
According to employment law specialists ELAS, last year’s National Sickie Day saw around 350,000 employees calling in sick at a cost to the UK economy of £45 million in wages, lost hours and overtime. This was an increase of almost a third on the year before.
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As a self-employed person I notice how different the world can be for those in the full-time employ of a single company. While I do get rather fed up with the lack of routine and the constant unpredictability, I can’t imagine having to attend the same office, sit at the same desk and talk to the same people day after day.
The way we work, the shape of our lives, has changed dramatically in my lifetime. I remember my dad asking when I would get my own office with my name on the door. I don’t think I have had either my own office or my name anywhere on a door. (Except for my name on the door of the fridge at BBC Salford chastising me for not putting the Soya milk back on the appropriate shelf.)
The way we work has undergone a revolution and there is yet more to come. Fewer sick days are taken now than at any time since 1990. On the face of it, this sounds like good news. But that is not the whole story. There are more women working (disproportionately represented in the “multiple part-time job” sector); since tuition fees were introduced, students have made up more of the casually employed workforce; and as our population ages so our reliance on foreign workers grows. Heavy industry and manufacturing have all but gone and with them the notion of the “job for life”. Instead we welcome the "gig economy”, the hand-to-mouth, job-to-job way of working.
Government statistics show that almost a million workers are on zero-hour contracts; the Unite union reckons that figure could be more like 5.5 million. For these citizens there is no sick pay; if they don’t show up for work, they don’t get paid. And while there are just under 1.5 million unemployed that figure is dwarfed when one considers that 3.3 million workers want more work or to move from a part-time to a full-time job, and the wraparound security that comes with it.
Endemic underemployment has now replaced actual unemployment as the single biggest issue in the labour market. And this underemployment is driving the ever-increasing inequality between rich and poor. A survey last year also found that young adults working in the zero-hour economy were 50 per cent more likely to report mental health conditions.
The notion of National Sickie Day will soon become an anachronism; it belongs to the nine-to-five, 40-hours-a-week, two weeks in Marbella world that is quickly becoming a fiction. We are told by business owners and right-wing politicians that we need a more flexible, nimble and strategic workforce. Interestingly none of these business owners and politicians live in the gig economy, none are swathed in the insecurity of struggling to feed a family without being able to budget for the week, let alone the month ahead.
The older I get the more I abhor capitalism and the “free market”, a market that enslaves many more than it liberates. It makes me sick. But rest assured, I’ll be at work tomorrow.