Are Germany's getting sicker... or lazier?

A record umber of people called in sick last year. Does this bode badly for Germany's modern work ethic?

Photo by Shane on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

For the last two years, Germans have suddenly been getting a lot more sick. Or, I should say, they’ve been calling in sick a lot more often.

In 2022, the number of sick days people took shot up to around twenty two. That is over four weeks in which people were apparently lying in bed.

While that number had been slowly creeping up for years (from around 12 sick days per annum in 2008 to 18 in 2021) the figure for 2022 marked a very sudden leap.

These figures are collected by health insurance companies and then averaged out by the National Association of Health Insurers. While I haven’t seen the overall average for last year, figures released by some of Germany’s main health insurers suggest that the number may have gone even higher.

The obvious thing to remark about this spike is that it took place after the Covid pandemic.

Intuitively, one would expect the number of people calling in sick to have surged in 2020 as Covid swept through an unvaccinated population and to have remained high while the vaccine was being rolled out in 2021. In fact, people took fewer days off work in those two years than in 2018-2019.

Peculiarly, the big leap in sickness came after the large majority of Germans had been vaccinated, and after the coronavirus had mutated into a more mild variant.

Just to put these sick days into some sort of context: the Association of Pharmaceutical Research has calculated that last year’s recession - the one that led to The Economist naming Germany the “sick man of Europe” once again - wouldn’t have happened without all these extra days off work.

If sick days had stayed at levels seen in previous years, the economy would have grown by 0.5 percent rather than shrinking by 0.3 percent, they found.

The theory being proposed to explain this phenomenon is quite fascinating. It would be interesting to hear from readers abroad about whether similar things are happening elsewhere.

Basically, people agree on the fact that the numbers are not primarily to be explained by a real increase in illness (nor that vaccines did it!). Instead, the Covid years led to a switch in mindset among the public (particularly among young people) about what to do when you are feeling a little unwell.

Public health messaging around COVID-19 about staying inside to avoid passing an infection to others has been so internalised that people are still staying at home if they have a runny nose or a sore throat.

According to a survey released by health insurer Pronova BKK, six in ten German workers now say that they’ll stay at home when they feel slight symptoms of an infection, even if they could go to work. That flips the figures from 2018, when two thirds said they would bite the bullet and go to the office.

Additionally, young workers these days have much less of a problem with citing mental fatigue as a reason for taking days off work.

A study of attitudes among people under 30 by health insurer AOK attributed a sudden jump in the number of sick days they take to both a rise in mental illness and a change in attitudes around this subject. Mental illnesses “are no longer taboo, young people are very willing to talk about mental health problems and seek support,” said study author Sabine Deutscher.

Up until this point - that a rise in sick leave is explained by people being more willing to take days off - everyone can broadly agree. Where it gets interesting is the question of whether this a problem… or actually a positive development.

For some, it is a sign that German workers are at last listening to their own bodies and minds. For others, it is the latest symptom of an increasingly wimpy society in which absenteeism has been normalised.

Modern Germany is a place where people “soak their oats the night before so that they can spoon them out of a jar on the train the next day… cautiousness, sensitivity and mindfulness have taken over,” fumed conservative commentator Ursula Weidenfeld in a particularly vivid attack on Generation Z.

Staying at home may have been the right choice during the Covid years, but “it’s selfish now… phone calls go unanswered and colleagues have to work longer hours. The flip side of self-care is free-riding,” argued Weidenfeld in a recent article for Der Spiegel.

Germany didn’t get rich by putting their own sensitivities above the greater good, Weidenfeld admonished her readers: “If people want to preserve the comforts of our society, they have to work to the max - even if they have a cold or occasionally don't feel very well!”

That was an attack that Gen Zers and their spokespeople in the media were never likely to take lying down.

Calling on people to drag themselves in the office when they are sick “isn’t just simplistic, it’s dangerous,” raged journalist Markus Sutera in a reply in Der Spiegel. “What is actually selfish is taking your germs into work and infecting other people… If I want to ‘work to the max’ I need to be healthy!”

Anyway, look a little closer at the stats and you’ll see that “working to the max” is what is causing a rise in sick days, he adds. Sickness is high in sectors with labour shortages. “Others fill in for them… until they suffer from burnout. And that isn’t something you can just sleep off in a night or two.”

Workers looking after both body and soul will pay off for companies in the long term, Sutera concludes: “We should be glad that people are willing to get help and take the time out they need.”

If we’re honest, most of us will probably recognise some truth in both these arguments.

Jobs such as elderly care, which have some of the highest levels of both labour shortages and sick-related absence, aren’t generally associated with Gen Zers who need a week off to recover from the fact that someone has misgendered them.

Paradoxically, these same labour shortages are giving young people a level of control older generations could only have dreamed of: they have their upper hand over employers who are desperate to find qualified workers. Add that to the fact that you don’t even need to turn up at a doctor’s surgery to get a sick note these days - a telephone call will do - and the barrier to “pulling a sickie” is lower than it once was.