.
With sick-leave abuse becoming a daily phenomenon in the rapidly deteriorating state health sector, and other public services suffering from the absence of key personnel, it makes one wonder hw the government machine continues to operate, even though the civil service has shrunk during the past few years.
It was Engomi Mayor Zacharias Kyriakou’s turn over the weekend to shine a bright light on what he termed as a ‘scourge’ within his own town hall, where doctors’ justification for municipal workers constantly absent due to sick leave has gone overboard.
Kyriakou said that such practice was unheard of in the private sector where he worked for forty years, yet he has been a mayor for six and only now has discovered there is a problem.
None of the past and present administration officials have ever dared to clamp down on this abuse because of a fear of taking on trade unions, who claim that sick leave is an “earned right”, as if civil servants have ever been deprived of any of their rights in
The same also applies to public schools, but there unions have found their way to accommodate the hundreds of substitute teachers by stepping in whenever the regular teacher is away (which happened very often). This was obviously a union-led ploy to get substitutes to accumulate teaching hours that will count towards their credits when it comes to taking on more teachers on a permanent basis in the already-bloated education system.
Earlier this year, Justice Minister Ionas Nicolaou vowed to find ways to end the abuse of sick leave within his ministry, including among police and prison wardens, but we have yet to hear anything on that front.
And only last month, Auditor-General Odysseas Michaelides said that district court judges routinely fail to fill out application forms for paid leave, which makes it impossible to track how many leave days they use up at the end of each year.
Ironically, it was the government’s own Public Administration and Personnel Department that issued a circular three years ago warning department heads to refrain from dishing out sick leave to civil servants upon being notified of a transfer or reassignment. This followed a report that found that in 2013 alone, a total of 1,711 full-time ministry employees and 484 part-time staff took sick leave. Of these, 30 per cent were absent from work from one to six days, while 300 were absent for at least one day without handing in a doctor’s slip.
As a matter of record, the number of sick days per worker in 2016 in
