In a Germany with a faltering economy, the significant increase in sick leave among workers has become a major concern for business leaders. For Marcus Lentz, private detective, it’s a godsend.
Never has his agency, which proposes to investigate employees suspected of calling in sick for no real reason, been in such demand, this professional based in Frankfurt, the country’s financial capital, told AFP.
“There are more and more companies that no longer want to put up with this,” explains Marcus Lentz, claiming to receive up to 1,200 requests of this type per year, twice as many as a few years ago. “If someone has 30, 40 or sometimes up to 100 sick days per year, at some point they become economically uninteresting for the employer,” adds the detective, who has been installed since 1995.
From automotive titans to fertilizer producers, German companies are sounding the alarm over the impact of high sickness absence rates on Europe’s largest economy.
Some bosses do not mince their words, like Ola Kallenius, general manager of Mercedes-Benz, who deplores that “absenteeism in Germany is sometimes twice as high as in other European countries”.
Tesla makes headlines
Tesla, Elon Musk’s group whose European electric vehicle factory is located near Berlin, made headlines in the press by sending executives to ring the homes of absent employees to check the reality of their sick leave.
German workers took 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.
And this trend is expected to become even more pronounced in 2024: one of the main German insurance funds, TK, indicates that it covered 14.1 sick days on average per worker during the first nine months of the year, a record.
A “dangerous shortcut”
According to OECD data, Germans missed an average of 6.8% of their working hours in 2023 due to illness, more than in neighboring countries such as France, Italy or Spain.
If detective Marcus Lentz tracks down fraudsters, attributing the increase in sick leave to abuse alone would be a “dangerous shortcut”, underlines the WSI institute of the Hans Böckler Foundation, linked to German unions.
This amounts to “obscuring the really relevant causes”, according to Bettina Kohlrausch, scientific director of the WSI, who highlights factors such as the increase in respiratory illnesses, stressful working conditions and a weakening of social protection systems. The aging of the German population, with an increasingly large share of people over 55 in the working population, is also an explanatory factor.
Significant drop in production
Whatever the reasons for this trend, “it undoubtedly affects” the performance of Germany, already in the grip of a crisis in its economic model, Claus Michelsen, economist at the German Business Association, told AFP. pharmaceutical research (VFA).
This federation had calculated that the increase in sick leave had led to a significant drop in production in 2023 without which the German economy would have grown by 0.5%, while it contracted by 0.3%. A finding corroborated by the Bundesbank according to which “relatively high” illness rates have “slowed down economic activity” in 2023.
(afp)