Absent Minded

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Progress in combatting absenteeism has been erratic in much of Europe, where unions are powerful and the welfare state persists. In the Netherlands during the 1990s, the Dutch government shifted the bulk of the responsibility for the first year of a worker's sick pay from its own coffers to those of employers. Dutch companies, went the thinking, would thus police their workers' absences more carefully. It seems to have worked: one study by the Labor Force Survey shows absenteeism in the Netherlands fell about one-third between 2000 and 2002.

Elsewhere, however, things have not changed. In Germany, employers pay the first six weeks of illness benefits — a responsibility that cost them €33 billion last year. In 1996, the then Christian Democratic government lowered benefits from 100% to 80% of a worker's salary, triggering outrage among unions. In 1999, the red-green coalition under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder reversed the decision, in order to fulfill an election-campaign promise.

And European governments are also hampered by their policies toward long-term illness. At present, some 37 million Europeans are officially listed as disabled. Definitions vary, but in the U.K., a person who is still ill after receiving full occupational or statutory sick pay — a benefit that, in the case of the government scheme, lasts for 28 weeks — is then reclassified from being "in employment" to receiving Incapacity Benefit. That benefit costs the U.K. government some €3.6 billion a year more than unemployment benefit. And the longer you're on Incapacity Benefit, the higher the payout becomes. Says Clare Hinkley, policy adviser to the Human Resources Directorate at the Confederation of British Industry: "There is some suspicion ... that this acts as an incentive for people to go onto Incapacity Benefit and not get off."

Just as some businesses benefit from creating false sick workers, so, too, do some European governments use disability rolls to disguise unemployment numbers. In the past 15 years or so, U.K. unemployment has fallen by about 1 million. In the same time period, however, expenditure on Incapacity Benefit has more than doubled to €9.5 billion, and now, about 7.5% of the working population receive such benefits.

Other countries have the same issues. At the end of 1999, about 200,000 people were officially unemployed in the Netherlands. But according to a recent o.e.c.d. report, almost five times as many were receiving disability benefits. And "that's the end of the story," Stefan Tromel, director of the European Disability Forum, told the Financial Times.

Other methods have been devised to address the problem in the short term — like attendance bonuses. At the Moeller plant in the Czech Republic, such bonuses have succeeded in reducing absenteeism even as the situation in the rest of the country deteriorates. But the idea leaves some observers incredulous. Says France's De Closets: "A reward for simply coming in and doing the job?"

There's always the simplest motivator for people to turn up: the prospect of no job at all. As the economic downturn lingers on, some European authorities are reporting declines in absenteeism. "When people are worried they may lose their jobs," says Wieslaw Lagodzinski, spokesman for the Central Statistical Office in Warsaw, "they have much more respect for work." In Germany, where the 11.1% unemployment rate is at its highest for 10 years, absenteeism is at its lowest level since 1991. A sick economy, it seems, can make for a healthier workforce.