Yeah, I have no idea how any of these figures are derived, but... I have a hard time imagining a planet where 1.8 weeks of our Polish employees and 2.7 weeks of our Dutch employees are 'lost due to sick leave' per annum.

Days? Maybe. Weeks? On average? Nah... But, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete"

I probably get there, but I have young kids.

But yes, these are averages between 1 person having 12 weeks and 12 people with 1 week. It's most likely power law distributed, so the average will feel weird.

There are people with cancer, severe car crashes and other horrible but temporary medical conditions in this average.

> But, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete"

Okay, let's consider what laws like this (the existing one) do.

In the US most employers don't care if you take a normal number of sick days, don't require a doctor's note, regardless of whether the law allows them to. Sick days are like vacation days, it's your own business how you use them. This is fine. And if you want to make a major long-term disability claim then you'll be expected to prove it, but that seems overall pretty reasonable?

That's the common case. No major incentive for employers to cause friction with workers who are mostly acting in good faith. Then there are employers who are, let's say, less selective about their employees, will hire anyone willing to do the job, but correspondingly then see a high rate of fraud. These employers want to be able to demand evidence all the time because the sort of people they're willing to hire would be taking three months of paid vacation a year as sick days if they could get away with it.

Since the law applies to everyone, what does a law like that do? In the common case it does nothing because the employer doesn't do it regardless. In the high fraud cause it prevents something good and increases actual fraud.

So the only time it does something good is the uncommon edge case on the other side where the employer requires that even though their employees mostly weren't faking sick days. And because most employers for that type of work don't do that, those employers don't get any major benefit from it anyway and employees don't like it, the ones who do are at a competitive disadvantage, so it stays uncommon.

Which means the main effect of the law is to cause problems for the employers willing to do "second chance" hiring of people who might screw them over, which harms not only the employer but also those workers when employers stop being willing to hire them because the law requires them to take the hit if they do.

To put this into perspective, young children have an average amount of 16 colds per year (there's even a cool repo for incidence data, I suspect you could get more precise [1]). With an increasing number of parents both being in the labor market, and with childcare facilities increasingly (and rightfully IMO) refusing to take in sick kids, this means that parents need to take their own sick days to care for them.

It's difficult to do a back of the napkin calculation, but you can easily see how 16 colds x 3 days / 2 parents leads to 24 excess sick days for parents per kid (discounting for some overlap when multiple kids are sick) over the first few years.

[1] https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/GrippeWeb_Daten_des_...

Immigrants and expats. My colleague from India, who lives and works with me in the Netherlands, calls in sick at least once per month.