July 14, 2008
Guru was recovering in bed from a particularly non-lethal bout of man flu this morning when he accidentally sat on the remote control, lost a classic episode of Monty Python on UK Gold, switched over to the news and discovered that, in the last year alone, up to six million Brits have sued their employers for illnesses or injuries picked up at work.
Six million? Hang on a minute.
Considering there are only 29.5 million people in work in the UK, this means more than one in five workers have sued their organisations in the last 12 months.
HR departments must be busy. An average organisation with 100 members of staff would currently be fielding 20 lawsuits from sickly workers - let alone all the others for discrimination, unlawful dismissal and so on.
So what is wrong with all these litigious, injured workers? Well, apparently a quarter of those who had been injured or taken ill because of their work in the last year suffered from stress, another quarter from back pain, and the rest from a variety of disorders including the rather scary sounding 'breathing problems'.
In total, according to the poll by YouGov for insurance firm RSA, 11.8m workers suffered illness or injury at work last year, with half of them opting to sue.
Looking around his friends, Guru reckons the only way this statistic can be true is if people count contacting the common cold from their desk buddies as a work-related illness.
Imagine if that one catches on. Every single commuter and office worker will be able to take December off and sue their employer for the mucus fest that has enveloped them. Employment lawyers will be rich, clipboard-wielding pollsters will be producing even more ridiculous reports, and HR directors will be the only ones left in the workplace, dealing with the very real stress of a thousand legal claims.
Or could it all be down to a little bit of exaggeration by the survey firm? Apparently only 1,979 adults were interviewed for the report - presumably they were found on the admissions list of the nearest hospital.
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Comments (2)
I note that stuff coming out of 'offical' organisations is a complete load of BS most of the time. I noted a similar spurious use of statistics regarding teenagers and their careers aspirations just a couple of days before your post:
http://stonecast.blogspot.com/2008/07/teenagers-wronged.html
Who's paying for this twaddle?
Posted by Bina | July 17, 2008 2:21 PM
Posted on July 17, 2008 14:21
Utter rubbish. People do abuse the system and organisations could be much better at helping/managing absence(delete as appropriate) but this sort of "research" really does not help.
If you are looking for a really "interesting" statistic look at how many people are claiming disability allowance - now there is a crime of huge proportions going on under our noses and we seem more interested in silly people and canoes and thick footballers having a couple of beers!
Posted by Scott McArthur | July 25, 2008 9:05 AM
Posted on July 25, 2008 09:05