There’s more than one kind of diarrhoea

Via Stuff:

The so-called “mental health day” could become extinct under law changes allowing bosses who suspect a worker of pulling sickies to demand they front up with proof after only one day.

At present, employers must have reasonable grounds to suspect an illness is not genuine to seek a medical certificate before the worker has had three consecutive days off.

However, the change would allow bosses to require staff to provide proof they are really sick from day one. The employer would have to pay the cost of a doctor’s visit.

Not anti-worker, as such: the employer pays for the visit. But the last time I needed a medical certificate was last year when a stomach bug caused me to miss a terms test for an undergraduate paper I took (discrete mathematics). It was midwinter so when I called the doctor’s surgery to make an appointment the earliest he could see me was midway through the next week – by which time I was in perfect health. I very briefly described my symptoms: ‘I had diarrhoea!’ He said ‘I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,’ and wrote me my certificate and charged me fifty dollars. It was all a pointless waste of time and the new law is designed to reproduce this scene tens of thousands of times a year.

Some of the government’s labour market reforms seem sensible – the ability to transfer public holidays and cash up a weeks leave sound pretty good to me – but most of them are solutions to problems we don’t have.

If our economy suffered from an inflexible labour market with industries crippled by industrial action and companies unable to compete internationally because of high costs imposed by collective bargaining then an anti-union policy platform might make some sense. But we have one of the most liberal labour markets in the world and regularly top the international ease of doing business surveys. None of these reforms do anything about the problems we do have: low wages and high worker emigration. If anything they’ll make them worse.

To me it all looks like a negotiated arrangement with the government’s financial supporters – unhappy with the Foreshore and Seabed settlement and furious about the ETS – refusing to open their checkbooks unless they get some material benefits and the PM and his strategists figuring ‘what the hell, we need the money and people who join unions don’t vote for us anyway.’

I don’t know how any of this will play out politically but on an anecdotal level I went to the garden centre yesterday (I’m planting snow peas) and heard two separate groups of people complaining about the fire-at-will provision. It seems to upset people’s sense of fairness. Sure, the sample size is so small it’s meaningless but I’ve never heard anyone talking politics at the garden centre before so maybe that signifies something.