As sick leave costs spiral, European states move to cut benefits

Across France, Germany and the UK the story is the same: people are sicker, and governments are blaming the sick

A little over a year ago, in January 2024, I wrote about how German workers required a record number of sick days in 2023. That record didn’t hold for long though; it was broken in 2024, according to Germany’s largest health insurer, Techniker Krankenkasse.

Last month, Deutsche Welle reported “Businesses seek to cut sick pay in Germany,” noting that, “businesses suggested that this was because people were skiving off work.” As pandemic denialism remains entrenched in public policy and the public imagination, it’s hardly any wonder that data indicating widespread illness continues to be either suppressed or openly rejected by those in power.

The piece in DW goes on to quote the Federal Chairman of the German Association of General Practitioners as saying, “What I'm seeing in my practice these days is exactly what recent reports from health insurance companies have shown: More people are coming into my practice with acute infections,” and the President of the German Medical Association as affirming, “playing sick does not happen on a large scale.”

Nonetheless, pressure is building from private interests and public figures to “address” the sick leave crisis- not only in Germany, but across the continent.

In the US, we have no guaranteed sick leave, and access to long-term sick leave is rare, through employers. As our citizens have gotten sicker, we’ve seen the evidence in more brutal data, for example, our record homelessness numbers. We’ve also seen school absences double, and rapidly rising disability in the Civilian Labor Force. But in general, we work sick. As Europeans get sicker, employers and states are pushing them to do the same.

This week, Le Parisian reported cuts to sick leave benefits in France, following years of escalating costs. The article notes that costs jumped from $8 billion in 2017 to $17 billion in 2024, while another article in HR World pegs absenteeism at 43 million days in 2014, versus 77 million in 2022.

In October of last year, Barron’s reported on the targeting of benefits:

France's government said Sunday that state workers behind a massive rise in absenteeism will be targeted as it desperately seeks billions of euros in budget savings.

The finance ministry said that almost 1.2 billion euros could be saved by only paying state workers after the third day of sick leave, instead of the current one day, and by cutting the benefits paid. The measure would not affect maternity leave, work accidents and proven serious illnesses.

The language of pandemic denialism runs clearly through this reporting, and the public sector pressure on employees to simply work through unprecedented illness.

In the capitalist retelling of life since 2020, it’s not that our governments completely failed to control a deadly virus, let it spiral endlessly until recurrent infections are inevitable, and now workers are struggling to make it to work between virus after virus. No, no, it’s the workers who are to blame for their own degraded health! If, after all, they aren’t just making the whole thing up!

The reality: in 2020, a new virus met the public. Infection with this new virus, SARS-COV-2, does not provide long-term immunity against reinfection, meaning that individuals may be reinfected as frequently as multiple times a year. This virus now circulates completely freely; despite knowing this virus is airborne, most governments took no action to upgrade indoor air quality.

As the virus circulates, it also mutates, creating new divergent variants to which the public does not have prior immunity, creating large waves that happen throughout the year (not just in the winter, as we saw with this past summer’s KP.1/KP.2 wave)

In addition, COVID can leave the body with a variety pack of lasting damage, whether that be a syndromic form of Long COVID, heart attacks, strokes, new onset autoimmune disease, or simply immune damage leaving one vulnerable to additional infections. For example, a 2023 study found that “prior COVID-19 infection was associated with a significantly increased risk for RSV infection among young children in 2022. Similar findings were replicated for a study population of children aged 0–5 years in 2021.” In other words, rampant COVID doesn’t just mean rampant COVID. It means rampant COVID, rampant RSV, rampant flu, etc.

So, knowing that we moved from a world where this virus did not exist, to a world where everyone is exposed to and thus becoming infected with this virus as soon as their immunity wanes, how on Earth would such a new “normal” not produce a higher number of sick days, on average? A greater amount of illness among the public? To posit otherwise is rank absurdity and denialism.

Unhappily, it is the capitalist narrative that has been allowed to run freely, with little pushback from typical countervailing forces. Left-leaning outlets have maintained silence as mask bans moved forward and failed to connect the mass sickening of workers to the labor struggle. Unions, too, prioritized the short-term appeal of “back to normal” over the long-term warnings of workers who spoke out about being disabled by Long COVID in the workplace. Center-left leaders like Rep. AOC and the Squad dropped masking along with the Biden administration and never mentioned it again; they also fail to talk about clean air or any plan to reduce the spiraling airborne infectious disease problem.

As prominent left outlets, politicians and organizations abdicated the COVID issue, right wingers rushed into the space to shape the narrative. COVID was and is “over,” everything is “normal,” and anyone who speaks of it is “crazy”. This is the sociopolitical backdrop against with the state moves to strip benefits- as they loudly claim that sick and disabled people are “faking it”.

The UK provides an instructive- and worrisome- case study. Long-term sick leave numbers were relatively stable at around 2.2 million from 2000 to Q1 2020. But- surprise, surprise- as of today, recent figures put the number at just under 2.8 million, or an increase of 27% in five years.

As you can imagine, the increase is the subject of national dismay, although certainly not enough to invite self-reflection about the “let it rip” pandemic policy. Instead, it’s - you guessed it- the sick being blamed. The right wing, of course, are complaining about laziness, screeching about the high costs and scrambling for benefit cuts. Terms like the “Sick Note Economy” blare in the press as the Daily Mail reports that Long-term sick costs will surpass the defense budget by 2030. But what should really terrify us is how Labour, the nominally center-left opposition party, is reacting.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer referred to the UK as a “country that simply isn’t working” when launching his employment strategy; as part of his program, he and the Labour Party plan to force sick people back to work.

Echoing the right-wing claims that sick and disabled people are simply faking their illnesses- but of course in a nicer-sounding package- the Labour government has been parading their plans to push the long-term ill off of those pesky benefits. The Guardian reports, “Labour’s emphasis is on providing more skills, training and jobseeker support, investing in mental health care and cutting NHS waiting lists.”

People who’ve been on long-term sickness leave and claiming benefits will need to get back into the workplace ‘where they can,’ Keir Starmer has said…. “I think the basic proposition that you should look for work is right”

Of course, this statement implies that people who are on long-term sick leave are not going back to the workplace although they could, are claiming benefits when they should not be, and are not looking for work although they might be. All of which are far-right wing beliefs about benefits; but all of which you’d have to believe, to believe that long-term sick leave usage has just spontaneously increased by 27% for no reason, since there isn’t a pandemic going on.

The center-left’s utter abdication on the pandemic has left us with a single-sided narrative when it comes to COVID. It happened. It ended. As the public gets- and remains- sicker, we have no story to explain why this is happening, who is to blame, who must be held accountable, what must change, and how we can move toward a better future. So instead, our center-left politicians cast about for an explanation and find the only one available: it is the lazy sick and disabled people’s fault, and we must take the benefits away.

We will continue to see the state, aggressively and cruelly, come for benefits as the health of the public declines. Sick people cost money; letting a pandemic rip isn’t cheap, only easy. Governments will seek to continue squeezing profits from the well and casting the sick aside. It is up to us to understand this model, articulate this model, protect against this model, organize against it. Until then, we are all one COVID exposure away from disability, consigned to the “useless eater” pile, the subject of government ire and public denunciation.