Flu season creates workplace headaches

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/article/20140128/LIVEWELL01/140128754#flu-season-creates-workplace-headaches

By Cindy Krischer Goodman / The Miami Herald
January 28, 2014

After four days in bed with the flu, Cindy Papale returned to her office only to have a colleague come in sniffling and coughing, touching common surfaces and spreading germs. Within a few days, Papale was out again with a fever. “If people would stay home, then the rest of us might not get sick, too,” she said.

Flu season is here with a vengeance, and it can be tough on the workplace, creating resentment among co-workers, testing flexibility policies and putting the boss in awkward situations. Whether motivated by fear of losing their jobs, a desire to look responsible, a need for income or reluctance to give up vacation days, employees inevitably come to work sick. Some even put up a fight when colleagues or a boss suggests they go home.

“When you work in a close environment, if someone is not telling you to go home, they're thinking it,” explained Papale, an administrative assistant in a Miami-area office. “We're all just trying to stay well.”

Experts are calling this flu season the worst in a decade, predicting that at least 20 percent of the population has fallen or will become ill. In the past few weeks, odds are that if you haven't had the flu, you know someone who has had it.

FULL story at link.

[Sherman A1]

1. It is a shame that people are in situations where

they are forced to work sick, either through the guilt of their employer and the do more and more with less and less workplace mantra or that they simply cannot afford to miss a shift or two in order to take care of themselves. Such are the benefits of today's New Gilded Age in which we live and work.