A quick thought on illness, employment and holiday

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) have, in their infinite wisdom, ruled that employees who are sick whilst on annual leave can reclaim from their employers the holiday affected.

As this is an ECJ judgement, the UK is obliged to do something about it and the government has said that it will implement the change from October.

The obvious next step therefore is for someone to start trying to claim for days off because of illnesses which occur during weekends (or whenever their weekly rest days are). Ill on Sunday? Take Monday off…

Cynicism aside, I am happy to accept this on one condition: if employees fall ill during non-holiday time, their employer should have the right to reclaim the equivalent amount of holiday time from them in order to make up for this.

Fair’s fair after all…

6 Comments

  1. PeeWee says:

    “the government. . . implement the change from October”
    Why is it that there are some parts of the government that say they want to recuce red tape and costs to employers and there are other parts that are NFI?? which part of the “government” made this pronouncement? Vince Fumble from Richmond on Thames “let’s do down buinesss department”?

    • Misanthrope Girl says:

      As I said, because this emanates from ECJ we are obliged to implement it – something which would be the case regardless of who was in charge at BIS.

      I’d say that this makes a mockery of the whole exercise of red-tape reduction but we all knew that that was just another nice idea which was never going to happen, right?

  2. FrankC says:

    Not being a “2 weeks in Marbella, twice a year” type of guy I always had difficulty using my annual leave. I would use it up if I had to off sick/actually in hospital. Far easier than fiddling about with sick notes and such.

    • Misanthrope Girl says:

      As someone who hasn’t taken the statutory minimum of 4 weeks since 2007 (I’ve 17, 16, 15 and 19 days respectively in each of the last four calendar years) whilst at the same time usually managing to work from home if I am feeling under the weather (the joys of VPN) I certainly don’t need any more holiday time should I be unfortunate enough to fall ill on one of my rare holidays.

      If I did I’d probably not bother mentioning it.

  3. The Cowboy Online says:

    I used to work for a local authority and it was accepted that if you fell ill during your holiday you could claim those days back, and people did. I never fell ill during a holiday but would still not have claimed back my holiday if I had. This was going back six or seven years and seemed to be a pretty well established practice back then.