Employees in the Republic are a healthy lot, taking far fewer sick days than all but one other EU country.
We take less than half the sick days claimed by the industrious Germans and only a third of those registered by the Finns, who are the most likely to phone in sick, according to a new study.
The survey involved more than 16,000 workers across the 15 pre-accession member-states, using data collected during the third European Survey on Working Conditions conducted in 2000. The results put paid to the notion that the Irish chronically resort to the unofficial holidays afforded by sick days.
Details of the study prepared by researchers in Spain and Texas are published this morning in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine. They show that the Republic ranks second only to Greece in being least likely to phone in sick.
Of those surveyed, 6.7 per cent of Greek workers said they had phoned in sick over the past 12 months, while 8.3 per cent of a representative sample of Irish workers had done so.
Of UK workers, 11.7 per cent had phoned in sick in the previous year, while 16 per cent of Austrians and 18.3 per cent of Germans had called in sick. The Netherlands and Finland recorded the worst figures with 20.3 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
All survey work was done on a face-to-face basis, with workers only asked whether they had called in sick at least once in the past 12 months. Reasons for being out sick had to include one or more of a selection including an "accident at work", "health problems caused by work" or "other health problems".
When workers were compared by gender, men were slightly more likely to phone in sick compared to women. Of the Irish sample, 9.2 per cent of men phoned in sick compared to 7.3 per cent of women. Finland bucked this trend, however, with 22 per cent of men and 25.7 per cent of the women having phoned in sick.
The researchers, from the Universitat Pompeu Fabro in Barcelona and the University of Texas in Houston, noted there were very few direct comparisons between member-states measuring sickness absence. Yet sick days represent lost productivity and labour turnover costs had made sick days "one of the top policy priorities for EU governments", the authors argue.
