I remember once travelling on a GO Train in Toronto to attend a downtown class. The morning rush hour train was packed with people, jammed in nice and tight. The man next to me had a full-blown flu of some kind. He sneezed constantly, not just a light sneeze, but the explosive kind that deposits droplets far away. He coughed, and it sounded like his lungs were full of goo. He blew his nose. Everything was dripping.
But, squished in next to him, I couldn’t move. The train was packed and many more stations remained before I could get off. In horror, I wound my winter scarf high around my face and hoped I wouldn’t get the “plague” from him. (Thankfully I didn’t. I don’t know how I escaped that one.)
It wasn’t so long ago that going to work sick was perfectly acceptable. In fact, going to work sick was often expected. A few sniffles? Fine. Hacking cough? Best to get on with it and come to work anyway. Sneezing everywhere? Not the best, but sneeze into your elbow. Staying home was for sissies.
If you ignored all these requirements and still wanted to stay home, you were expected to visit the doctor and get a sick note to explain your absence. No one seemed to care that you were bringing your illness to the doctor’s office. Work at all costs!
Employees weren’t trusted to monitor their symptoms. You needed documentation to prove you were ill. If we wanted a day off, we were looked on with suspicion. You were “letting down the side” by staying home, curled up in bed, keeping all your viral particles to yourself.
I remember attending work or class sometimes shivering, sneezing and emptying tissue boxes because staying home was considered such a ‘slacker’ thing to do. Of course, I almost got nothing done, except spreading my lovely viruses here and there. My head was clogged, my eyes were red and puffy. Such a joy to have around.
Here we are now, six weeks into the lock down of Covid 19 and suddenly, it is okay to stay home. (Well, it is legislated of course.) Employers haven’t had the choice to discipline employees for coming in sick.
And you know? We’ve all adjusted. People (those ones who still have jobs) have found ways to work from home. Zoom sessions, phone calls, digital work platforms. We’ve discovered that working from home was possible. Before, working from home was seen as a sort of luxury — something only the trusted employees might be awarded. Now, coming in sick is not acceptable anymore. It’s not just a nice little virus you are transmitting — it’s something potentially deadly, and it’s not easy to tell whether it’s a cold or Covid 19.
What I’m really hoping for is that there won’t be a return to the ‘let’s go to work while we’re sick’ philosophy. That we’ve passed a milestone in our thinking, and the days of dragging yourself to work, sick and exhausted are finally over.
For too long, the expectation of ‘work no matter what’ has dominated our life as employees. It may have come in under the Industrial Revolution, so that employees either had to be cogs in machines, or cogs in cubicles, working no matter how they felt.
Perhaps with a foe as dangerous as Covid 19, that time is over. Granted, there will be economic upheaval (there already is). Jobs have been lost. Companies have been closed. However, these losses may have been predicated on the efforts of employees toiling for years whether they were sick, or exhausted, or both. Perhaps a new type of economy will emerge from the chaos of Covid 19, painful as that change will be.
At least we may not have to go to work sick any more.
