I was thinking about responding to amerigo's need to know, since I'm also a government agency employee-- but there the similarity ends. But I'd rather respond to you instead.

I advocate generous and humane leave policies, and encourage the fullest use of the meager leave allotted to Amerikan wage slaves.

Although I'm obviously a Rogue Stuporvisor, I'll make a probably vain attempt to establish bona fides: Once, after a few years of employment, I was unexpectedly summoned to the manager's office. It turned out that the office timekeeper had alerted him to the fact that I had been "losing" unused leave at the end of each year.

I had what wage-slavers consider the "right attitude". My health was good, I wasn't in the "habit" of taking vacations, and I hadn't used up my time because I didn't have any special reason to take time off. I vaguely knew I was "losing" leave, but it didn't bother me.

Bless his heart, the manager was just giving me a friendly "heads up"-- for a while afterwards, I was teased for being the only State Worker in History to be called into the manager's office for excessive non-use of leave.

Of course, to those with a pious affinity for "productivity", this will not only fail to improve my standing-- they'd probably castigate the manager for encouraging me to take the leave I'd earned. Unless, of course, it was clear that my unwillingness to take time off was adversely affecting my Productivity.

Like all oppressive and dehumanized forms of servitude, wage slavery cultivates a class of True Believers who function as "capos" or "trusties", always with a view to serving the system at the expense of the employee. Hi, there!

The down side of absenteeism is obvious from an "all things being equal" perspective. Workplaces must be designed and planned with assumptions that it takes an optimum number of meat puppets to accomplish the work, and that the meat puppets ought to show up on scheduled workdays, do the work they were hired to do, and for which they are paid.

It's also a given that absence can adversely impact operations in varying degrees, and that both co-meat puppets and customers are adversely impacted by the ripple effects of unscheduled absence.

As it happens, I didn't even know how people-pinching the Amerikan wage-slavers are until I happened to meet a visitor from Europe on his annual "holiday". He mentioned that he couldn't believe how limited and restricted US leave policies are! Somehow, I was born with a "European" sensibility.

The reactionary "businesslike" mindset-- and it certainly is businesslike-- in these comments brings me back to a training session on a revised leave and attendance policy for state agencies.

The Q&A was dominated by a group of hard-line stuporvisors wailing and gnashing their teeth about workers with chronic health issues, including "worker's comp" recipients with work-related health issues, being "protected" by the existing system.

They couldn't stop excoriating the reprobate slugs who dragged everyone else down by "milking" and "gaming" the system, etc. They really hoped that this new, improved policy would let the stuporvisors more quickly cut out the dead wood-- without making the stuporvisors "the bad guys", of course!

It was like sitting with fanatic death-penalty advocates bitching about the appeals process and all the money wasted on those country-club Death Rows. I was expecting to hear one exclaim "Work or starve!", or even mutter, "If they had like to die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Although had they made those remarks, they would've been original! This bunch gave the impression that they were too busy Working and picking up for the slackers to do much reading.

My point is that there's a fundamental attitude that drives analysis and judgement concerning the employment relationship, and the absence of empathy is readily discernible in those who preach that "shoulder-to-the-wheel", "nose-against-the-grindstone" perspective.

I've gotten just as momentarily pissed-off as anyone that so-and-so had another unscheduled "family emergency"-- can we cover for her? Or aggravated that we can't hire anyone because this or that "slot" still belongs to someone on indefinite leave. (Lately, that's as likely to be active-duty military leave, but that's another can of worms.)

For a while, The Japanese were extolled as the ideal, modern wage-slaves; apparently they were tireless as ants, enthusiastically responded to the challenge of zero-tolerance work rules, and professed a quasi-religous worship of the employer.

They didn't need no stinkin' paid sick days! I presume there was some sort of workplace Rapture in which these selfless cogs were taken to Employment Heaven en masse, because we don't hear about them so much any more. Oh, and I don't know what they do in Employment Heaven, since "freedom" would only disorient them.

Too bad it's absolutely unthinkable that business operations be designed in the first place with sufficient redundancy to deal humanely with issues like attendance and health care.

The adversarial relationship, and robotic meat-puppet views of employment presumed by no-nonsense stupervisory-types leads to no end of "iatrogenic" agony based on a bean-counter Weltanschauung that refuses to concede that Shit Happens.

This was always a mere media-manufactured tempest in a teapot.

If this contretemps had been in the least significant, Secretary Clinton would have used her good offices to bring BFF Rupert Murdoch over to her "boss"'s house-- and after a round or two of conciliatory brewski-hoisting, the lovers' quarrel would've been completely forgotten.