My god. This is still going on?
Airlines have sick policies. They're a business. Accept it and move on. You're not going to get far with "You shouldn't have a policy because we can't fly sick." It's not going to work. It hasn't worked in decades. On the flip side, any airline that actually fires someone for calling in sick when they're sick is gonna have one hell of a legal pay out. Now, if they bust you because you called in sick because you couldn't get a day off to get drunk and watch Denver get trounced by the Seahawks, well, you get what you deserve on that one. If people wouldn't call in sick to get days off, I honestly don't think there would be a need for attendance policies. However, that'll never happen in ANY job. Rare? Hell, no. I called it a week ago when I saw I was on reserve on Super Bowl Sunday. "Someone's going to call in sick, and we're gonna drop below reserve coverage." Now, someone may have been legitimately sick, and that's cool. However, having sat around and not gotten a call for 3 days, and then I get called out to cover a day trip on Super Bowl Sunday kinda makes me wonder. Oh, and since we were already at min coverage for reserves in base, no one could use PTO to just drop the day. Here's the thing with sick policies, unless you have a problem that needs to be fixed, you're probably not going to get close to any kind of reprimands IF you call in sick when you're sick. If you DO have a problem, that's what FMLA is for. I've got intermittent FMLA just in case I need to take a few days off to take care of my wife. Company can't say anything about it, and it doesn't count in the sick policy. Now, if you call in sick to get that "perfect schedule" a couple of months, and THEN get sick a few times, well, you're more in less the target audience anyway. My beef with the attendance policy here is how it was implemented, and I think the day absent in a 12 month period that triggers a review is way too low. We also can't "call in well" (yet), so if you have a 4 day and are sick on day 1 but well by day 3, you still get dinged with 2 extra days even though you could have flown if you wanted to. Until they get that fixed, I don't think there should be a max in 12 months. As it stands now, call in sick for 2 4-day trips, and you'll be getting a phone call. That's WAAAAY too low. Even someone that gets sick like a normal person is gonna call in that much in a year. It should be on a trip basis rather than a day basis. I also think that if you have to call in sick for multiple trips over a set period of time (like say 7-10 days), it should count as one occurrence since it's the same illness. We've got something similar in the new attendance policy, but I don't think the window is long enough.
As for "If you have PTO you should be able to use it," we might as well just shut the doors on the holidays. There's no way EVERYONE that a) has PTO and b) wants that day off can get it. "Well, they should have more reserves." Guess what? Reserves get PTO as well. That's a silly stance on the issue.
I see a lot of people saying that sick policies are bad and shouldn't be used to counter sick leave abuse, but I have yet to see anyone on that side of the argument put forth a valid example of how to curb the abuse without a policy. If you've got a CBA and no sick policy, anyone that gets called in for sick abuse will walk right back out of the office when the rep basically says the company had no grounds to call them in for a meeting. No policy means no violation, no violation means no discipline, no discipline means go do it again because there won't be any consequences. If you DON'T have a CBA and have no sick policy (aka us until a few months ago), there still not much the company can do to you since, again, there was technically no violation of company policy. Get fired for that, and a lawyer would eat them alive on a wrongful termination suit. I've been on the management side of attendance termination outside of the airline industry. The paperwork involved in that is simply staggering, and if it's not all documented, then they won't go forward with the termination for fear of a lawsuit. And that's WITHOUT a federal law saying "don't work sick."
