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Historically GermanyeuiwYour browser does not support the element. has been a world champion of the rights of workers related to their health. In 1883 Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German empire, set up the world’s first statutory health-insurance system with the Health Insurance Act, which included paid sick leave. Bismarck’s was not motivated by concern for workers’ welfare so much as a strategy to beat socialists at their own game. Yet it laid the foundations of Germany’s welfare state and was followed by laws on accident and disability insurance.German bosses are warning that the pioneering policy has become a handicap. Germany is now “the world champion when it comes to sick days,” according to Oliver Bäte, the boss of Allianz, Europe’s biggest insurer. In an interview with , a newspaper, Mr Bäte called for a “waiting day” (an unpaid first day of sick leave), which he claimed could save €40bn ($42bn) a year. German workers are sick on average 15 days a year compared with eight days for the as a whole.Ola Källenius, the boss of Mercedes, agrees with Mr Bäte. He warns of the “economic consequences” of a sickness rate in Germany that is often twice as high as in other European countries. Mercedes also manufactures cars and vans in Hungary, Romania, Spain and Poland in factories with comparable working conditions but with far fewer unwell workers taking time off. Another impediment is the last thing German business needs at a time when the economy is in recession for the second consecutive year, energy prices remain high and a trade war is looming.Germany has one of the most generous sick-leave regimes in the world and it is costing businesses dearly. It is not clear that Germans are more poorly than other Europeans. An ageing society and the pandemic have caused a new vulnerability to respiratory illnesses and mental-health challenges but that is true of most other countries. “It’s very hard to police,” says Jochen Pimpertz of the German Economic Institute (). In a study he found that the total nominal cost of sick pay for employers rose from €36.9bn to €76.7bn between 2010 and 2023 (a 57% increase, adjusted for inflation). That is partly a result of higher wages and a bigger workforce, but also because more people are calling in sick.There is clear correlation between the generosity of the system and the number of sick days, says Nicolas Ziebarth of the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. Germany’s arrangements are lavish compared with elsewhere in Europe and have become easier to manipulate. Workers receive 100% of their pay from the first day of sickness for up to six weeks. In Britain, for example, employees are not entitled to pay for the first three days of illness (a waiting period the government has promised to abolish) and then get £117 ($144) a week, a fraction of their salary. In 2022 the average Briton took only six sick days. In 2023 it became easier for Germans to call in sick as workers were allowed to get an electronic doctor’s certificate by phone rather than see one in person.Perhaps Germany should adopt a more Scandinavian approach. Sweden used to have a waiting day but this was abolished a few years ago. Mr Ziebarth also opposes the introduction of one in Germany which, he says, will probably encourage the sick to go to work, possibly infecting others or even hurting themselves or causing accidents. Swedish employers do, however, pay 80% of a worker’s salary for two weeks, after which a health insurer takes over as paymaster. But perhaps the most innovative features of the system is partial sick leave. Doctors can determine that a person is unwell but is still fit for doing some work and can therefore turn up for fewer hours.There are other more general measures that Germany could adopt to reduce time taken off such as hygiene routines that protect workers from infection, improved occupational safety and better ergonomics. Company doctors might provide flu vaccinations and advice on both physical and mental health. Policymakers have the hardest task: finding the right balance between giving genuinely sick workers time to recover without encouraging the sort of malingering of which Bismarck would almost certainly have disapproved.
