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.

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IveSeenItAll 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

> There are people with cancer

Oh, yeah, I know. One of our top (young! sad!) people in .nl has been intermittently-working for, like, months now due to that, unfortunately. But... that doesn't count as "sick leave"! Because, it's, like entirely foreseeable!

What is happening is that they, through the medical consultancy working for the employer (i.e. "us"), submit their proposed working schedule a few weeks in advance. This will have several 'non-work' days (around chemo), some 'partial-work' days, and so on, basically with hourly granularity.

"We" then plan and account accordingly: "we" pay for a few hours, insurance for a few, national-level insurance for a lot, but all "we" see is a plan for actual working time.

Conflating any of that with "oh, you can just stay home whenever you want" is sick and wrong, like so much of the discussion here around "Europe." I mean, you get eviscerated for wrongly naming a Chicago suburb, but blanket statements about an entire continent are de rigeur

	▲	317070 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In the OECD data averaged here, I reckon this chemo therapy is counted as sick leave. On a first search, the metric seemed to be defined as "(compensated) absenteeism from work due to illness, days per employee per year"