Leave

After the Nestle drivers and delivery workers ended a three-day-old strike, we heard a new story from another bank company in Hong Kong. To my amazement, they announced granting a day off for the employees on their very days of birthday. Like many "aha" ideas, it's so simple you wonder why nobody had thought of it before.

Why? You might ask. As Gordon Livingston has pointed out, life's two most important questions are "Why?" and "Why not?" The trick is knowing which one to ask.

If we are to program a computer to simulate a model of absence from work, it should probably take a whole year to complete the task. Absence from work is a strange term – but we've got quite used to it. The dictionary describes it as "nonattendance at work by an employee when attendance is expected by the employer." Think of it as not quite a simple phenomenon but more than mere human behaviour of calling in sick.

We may propose that much absence is attributed to sickness. Or is it?

If sickness is a major (true) cause of absence then one would expect absence rates to have fallen over the past 100 years as health care has improved. As a matter of fact, the rates of absence have not declined; they started to rise in all industrialized countries from about 1955. Clearly, sickness alone cannot be the sole cause of absence.

But I digress. How about an entitled leave on your day of birthday? This is not to say that leaves cause no blips. The fundamental difference between such leave and the absence by phoning in sick, as we can imagine, is that the former is planned ahead and therefore less costly to the organisations. This might not have measurable impact on the absence rates, I must admit. After all, the best litmus test touted for predicting worker absenteeism remains to be economic model. An essential tenet of the economic model is that employees absent themselves in order to engage in more attractive alternatives. This means that when unemployment is high absence rates would tend to plummet, indicating that employees may be considering the trade-offs (cost-benefit analysis, in technical terms) when they decide whether to phone in sick. If being absent implies a greater chance of job loss when jobs are scarce, the relative value of leisure may decrease.

All right, I am exaggerating – but only a little.