Absenteeism costs the Canadian economy more than $16.6 billion a year. However, not all absences are created equal. According to recent Statistics Canada figures, private sector employees are less often missing from the workplace than those in the public sector. We shine the light on these new data.
In 2012, full-time public sector workers took an average of 12.4 sick and personal days. The health care and social assistance sectors recorded the highest rates of absenteeism, followed by government and public administration. On the other hand, private sector employees were off 8.3 days.
This difference of 4.1 days can be explained through several factors. Most notably, the public sector workforce tends to be older, more female and more unionized, the study says.
It finds that unionized workers were absent from work an average of 12.9 days, compared with 7.5 days for non-unionized workers. This gap can best be attributed to the fact that union and public sector employees are generally
entitled to a higher number of sick days than their private sector counterparts.
The research also shows that absenteeism occurs more often among women than men, with 11.4 missed work days for female employees while men are absent an average of 7.7 days from the workplace.
"Currently there is no definitive explanation on why the gap exists," states the Conference Board of Canada.
Furthermore, older employees tend to take a greater share of days off than younger ones. Full-time workers between the ages of 55 and 64 missed 12.4 days, compared with 6.1 days for those aged 20 to 24.
The main concern, however, seems to be that less than half of Canadian organizations do not currently track employee absences, resulting in this great loss of productivity and revenues, notes the report.
Source :
<http://www.statcan.gc.ca/
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/