Embed Notice

the other day I saw an article in the newspaper about how the number of sick days workers take are rising, how it's "costing" the "economy" billions, and how capitalists now demand tighter restrictions on sick days, want doctors to be required to give more information to them as to why a given worker is sick (yknow, medical surveillance), and want workers to return to work earlier, doing shit like part-time or WFH before they're fully recovered. regional governments have already happily obliged wrt some of this. one far-right politician (herself a capitalist, unsurprisingly) has even proposed ending medical confidentiality between doctors and businesses.

this is of course absolutely ghoulish, and it's telling that the average capitalist immediately assumes they're getting fucked over. they are entirely focused on fucking over the workers they're exploiting, so of course they would assume that their employees reciprocate that same attitude. noone seems to even consider, for just a second, that maybe workers aren't faking and are in fact sick more often, on account of, yknow, the easily transmissible and heavily disabling covid pandemic that the vast majority of society has given up on mitigating at all.

that article, btw, is titled "Firmen wehren sich gegen Ausfälle", in english "Companies defend themselves against absences". the companies pressing for more surveillance and less sick leave are actually the victims, you see. it's obvious propaganda. none of this is presented in even a slightly critical light.

(article in question is here: https://archive.ph/JlB1y the title is different from the print version. there's some ableism in there too, just for good measure.)