The hospitality industry is hardly known for its generosity regarding sick pay. Few employers in this sector provide workers with their full salary when they need time off due to illness. As a result, hospitality workers often have to rely on statutory sick pay when they are unwell.
Currently, statutory sick pay, which employers are required to provide for up to 28 weeks, amounts to £118.75, translating to a measly £3 an hour. Furthermore, this princely sum is only paid after the fourth day of illness, including weekends and days on which people do not usually work. To make matters worse, those earning less than £125 a week are ineligible for any sick pay, leaving as many as 1.3 million workers—many in the hospitality sector—without support and reliant on benefits if they are sick for more than a few days.
The government’s new employment rights bill, currently progressing through Parliament, proposes changes to statutory sick pay. Under these proposals, statutory sick pay will be paid from the first day of illness, and the lower earnings limit of £125 will be abolished, ensuring that all workers are entitled to statutory sick pay from the outset of their illness.
A recent study commissioned by the TUC has found that employers could actually save money by adopting the government’s proposals. The study argues that easier access to sick pay may, counterintuitively, lead to reduced overall sickness absence, as workers would be less likely to spread contagious illnesses such as colds and influenza. It also suggests that earlier sick pay could prevent ill workers from dragging down colleagues’ productivity, boost overall morale and employee retention, and reduce longer absences.
Given that the proposed changes could actually save employers money, and considering that these changes are hardly revolutionary compared to sick pay schemes in other countries—such as Sweden and Germany, where sick pay is paid from the first day of illness at a rate of 80% of normal earnings—one might expect employers to welcome the changes; not a bit of it. The bright sparks at the Federation of Small Businesses has claimed that the changes to statutory sick pay “will make employers think twice about their hiring plans.” They are concerned that employees will be quicker to take sick leave, thereby increasing costs for businesses.
Who said Ebenezer Scrooge is dead? He is alive and well, running a small cafe where every employee is treated like family—provided, of course, that they do not take a day off sick and make the outrageous demand of being paid £3 an hour for doing nothing.