The news that one third of the sick days recorded by Bolton’s council workers is down to stress should not come as a surprise. The vast majority of jobs carry varying degrees of stress, especially those in competitive business, but the difference in the real world is that if you can’t cope your employers will dispense with your services.
Stress is as measurable as back pain and those council workers who use this excuse to take weeks off every year do so in the knowledge that they run no risk whatsoever of losing their jobs. Those jobs are funded by council tax payers who are legally obliged to pay whatever rate the council itself decides, and not by how commercially successful the council is. The opportunity to exploit the system is therefore limitless and if the stress card is increasingly used all the council has to do is raise its tax rates.
Tony Hutchinson
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