In Germany, which faces economic challenges, the large increase in sick leave among workers has become a major concern for company owners, but it is a source of livelihood for Markus Lentz, who runs a company specializing in detecting false illness claims among employees.
Lentz, who lives in Frankfurt, the country’s financial capital, confirmed to Agence France-Presse that his agency – which proposes to investigate employees suspected of claiming illness unjustly – has never witnessed such a volume of demand before.
“There is an increasing number of companies that no longer want to tolerate this situation,” he says, noting that his agency receives up to 1,200 such requests annually, doubling the number recorded a few years ago.
The investigator, who has been providing this service since 1995, adds, “If someone takes 30, 40, or sometimes up to 100 days of sick leave a year, at a certain point he will become economically useless to the employer.”
Economic impact
From auto giants to fertilizer producers, German companies are sounding the alarm about the impact of rising sickness absence rates on Europe’s largest economy.
Some company leaders are now openly expressing their positions on this issue, such as Ola Källenius, General Manager of Mercedes-Benz, who regrets that “the rate of absenteeism from work in Germany is sometimes double what it is in other European countries.”
Tesla, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk and whose European electric car factory is located near Berlin, made headlines by sending executives to the homes of employees absent from work to check on their illness.
German workers received an average of 15.1 days of sick leave in 2023, compared to 11.1 days in 2021, according to the National Statistics Institute (Destastis).
This trend is expected to become more pronounced in 2024, as one of the main German insurance funds, TK, indicates that it covered 14.1 days of sick leave on average per worker during the first nine months of the year, which is a record number. .
According to OECD data, Germans lost an average of 6.8% of their working hours in 2023 due to illness, more than neighboring countries such as France, Italy and Spain.
Trade union reaction
While investigator Markus Lentz is tracking down the “malingerers,” attributing the increase in sick leave to fraud alone constitutes a “dangerous simplification,” according to the WSI Institute, affiliated with the Hans Böckler Foundation, which is linked to German unions.
This amounts to “obscuring the real causes,” according to the institute’s scientific director, Bettina Kohlrausch, who highlights several factors, including the increase in respiratory diseases, stressful working conditions, and weak social protection systems.
The aging of the German population, with an increasingly large proportion of people over the age of 55 in the working population, is one factor explaining this situation.
In France, official statistics since 2019 also indicated an accelerating increase in sick leave in the private sector and among workers with civil service contracts, without taking into account sick leave related to Covid-19.
For his part, Klaus Michelsen, an economist at the German Business Association, said that whatever the reasons for this trend, it “undoubtedly affects” the performance of Germany, which is already suffering from a crisis in its economic model.
Sick leave to do another activity
The increase in sick leave led to a significant decline in production in 2023, as the German economy recorded a contraction of 0.3%, while it was supposed to grow by 0.5% without these leaves.
The German Central Bank confirmed this finding, with “relatively high” disease rates leading to a “slowdown in economic activity” in 2023.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, patients suffering from mild symptoms have been able to obtain sick leave from their doctor over the phone, and this mechanism, according to its critics, has made the task easier for those wishing to exploit the situation.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by more regular registration of sick leave, a new system that allows doctors to automatically transfer sick leave to patients’ insurance funds.
As for the “malingerers” monitored by Markus Lentz, a large percentage of them, according to him, use sick leave to engage in other activities in parallel.
These include a husband helping out with his wife’s small business, or employees using long-term sick leave to renovate their homes.
