Sick leave: what would an increase in the number of waiting days change for employees?
Save money on work stoppages. If the government wishes to improve the situation in the face of too many work accidentsby strengthening prevention, or by creating occupational doctor positions, he would also like to reduce Social Security expenses, reveals the weekly The gallery.
For this, the executive would like to increase the number of waiting days for people on sick leave, with the aim of making savings. Currently, in the private sector, employees on sick leave are entitled to daily allowances from their health insurance scheme.Health Insurance after a period of three days deficiency.
In detail, from the fourth day of sick leave, private sector employees can claim daily allowances, equal to 50% of the basic daily salary, paid by Social Security. As a reminder, the salary taken into account to calculate the daily allowance is capped at 1.8 times the amount of the minimum wage, the allowance cannot therefore exceed 52.28 euros gross per day.
Save a billion euros per year
To reduce the cost of these sick leaves, which represented 16 billion euros in 2022 and increase on average by 6% each year, the government plans to reduce the coverage of work stoppages, by extending the waiting period to four , five or six days. An extension of this period could allow the executive to make savings of up to one billion euros per year.
To avoid impacting employees, the government would like these additional waiting days to be reimbursed by employers. For their part, the latter would like the establishment of “public order” waiting days, which neitherHealth Insurance, nor the companies would reimburse. In such a situation, employees would therefore be the big losers.
According to La Tribune, the option favored by the government would be the latter, in order to re-establish a form of equity between private sector employees and civil servantsthe latter having only one day of waiting when they are on sick leave, but this is never compensated.
