My Wife doesn't get any sick leave at all, unless signed off by the Doctor. I think this is as much a cause for concern as people abusing the sick leave they are given. People going to work ill, especially those who look after children/old people etc is a very real danger.
That is also why I don't agree with Hugo's idea that incentive's to come to work are a good idea either.
I think this 'Sickness Emperor' will do more harm than good.
BTR you've hit the nail on the head and that is exactly what I've said. National Government and Local Government employees are protected with regard to sick leave and I take it by your wife's example that she doesn't work for local or national government.
In outside industry they don't have the sort of protection for genuine sick absences as they do in national and local government and it should be addressed.
However I think that the CCBC do not need to have a well paid additional person in to monitor sick leave, that is their line manager's job, no one else's and if they are not doing it properly then they should be held accountable for it.
The line manager should be able to determine the genuine cases from those that are not and should be looking for patterns in someone's sick absences. That's not just to get rid of people but to see if there are any underlying problems that the line manager can help them with.
Many years ago when I first started work I had to record the sick leave of a staff of about 30 people, roughly divided as 15 men and 15 women. When I checked them at the end of the year 3 women each had over 20 days sick leave and the aggregate total of sick leave for all the men came to less than 20 days. This isn't a sexist remark it is just a fact based on the figures I had obtained, yet to the best of my knowledge and belief this was never looked into and continued until the office closed.
I can quote many examples, for instance a person broke their leg and was off work on full pay for 6 months and then returned to work. Someone asked a close friend of hers "was she better" and the reply was that she couldn't afford to be on the sick as she would then be on half pay.
Another time when someone on another section returned back to work after yet having another day off on the sick, they asked me to sign their back to work form
I had a look through their sick record and noticed that they only had one day's sick leave each time and by coincidence every sick day was on a Friday. I refused and pointed out that they seemed to have Fridayitis and asked them to discuss it with their line manager who was coming in the following day.
It's the same old story about the small minority spoiling it for the rest but in this case it's the vulnerable and needy who lose out most