Over 50's club

5 lurkers | 321 watchers

Hanneke 19 Feb 8:23pm, 19 Feb 2024 120,265 posts	0 Hanneke Wow! I last worked 2 February 2023. Over a year ago. I run my own business and am freelance. I was initially told I wasn't entitled to anything, no support, no benefits but with the help of a horticultural charity called Perennial, I found out I was entitled to contribution based ESA. The Job Centre wrongly assumed that freelancers don't contribute. Thank goodness I always paid voluntary NIC, even when my turnover was so low, I didn't have to! I then found out I was entitled to the higher weekly amount and didn't have to find a job I could do through my cancer treatment. Thank goodness as I was and am way too unwell still to work! After 3 months, with the help of McMillan on advice of Perennial, I applied for PIP, as it was clear my disability was going to continue beyond 9 months. These combined benefits are just about enough to pay for my daily living. Thank goodness I paid off my mortgage a few days before getting ill last year! Not enough to pay for heating oil or my car MOT and service for example. Or my private treatment as the NHS has run out of options... I thought I was badly off, as I thought employers were supposed to make up the difference between SSP and your income. In the Netherlands you get 80% of you salary when you get ill!!! But if freelance you don't...Thought it was the same here, I am shocked!!! How are people supposed to cope, when ill as well? I know the stress about no money really made things worse for me!
Mandymoo 20 Feb 7:44am, 20 Feb 2024 18,399 posts	0 Mandymoo My boss had one set of rules for sickness etc, I had another and seeing as I was the one who sorted wages etc my rules went 🫣
Shades 20 Feb 7:53am, 20 Feb 2024 1,761 posts	0 Shades I've had many jobs but never one where an employer made up the difference between SSP and normal pay. I think SSP is only recoverable from HMRC for companies with only a handful of employees. Bigger companies bear the cost of SSP, although it's not much anyway. All the companies I worked for had different sick pay/policy schemes. Some paid full pay for a certain time, then you went onto SSP. Others paid no sick pay at all, some had flexi days that if you didn't use you got paid for at the end of the year. Fortunately it didn't bother me as I rarely had any time off for sickness. Over 40 years working I doubt I've had more than 20 days sick, if that.
jda 20 Feb 8:19am, 20 Feb 2024 16,526 posts	0 jda We had proper paid sick leave in all our UK jobs. In Japan, I once asked about it (we were being told to stay home if ill during one of the animal flu scares) and was assured that there was a proper sick leave policy. However no-one knew what it was and no-one had ever used it! Everyone took annual leave instead, which they had ample amounts of because of course they didn't use it up in the usual (western!) manner.
3M 20 Feb 8:50am, 20 Feb 2024 23,409 posts	0 3M I don't think any Employers can recover the cost of SSP any more. Certainly as a Charitable Trust with 5 employees we couldn't.... It can be a pretty painful overhead for a small business, which is possibly why most of the seem to have pretty cr@p sickness benefits, I think. There are advantages to being employed by "big corporates" around this (usually!). We self certify up to a week, no loss of pay, doctors "sick note/fit note" required for longer periods but up to 6 months full pay... (used to be two years - benefits were very good when I joined 29 years ago, but have slowly been eroded). I'd strongly recommend my employers from this side of things. (Sometimes not so much for the actual work!) That said, apart from one painful spell a good few years ago, I've not needed to use those things very much at all. 🤞🏻
Pou Pou le Phook 20 Feb 8:52am, 20 Feb 2024 4,298 posts	0 Pou Pou le Phook I always used all my annual leave!
Shades 20 Feb 9:00am, 20 Feb 2024 1,762 posts	0 Shades 3M - I'm not surprised that no SSP is recoverable any more, that was the next step. For a very small company it can be a major liability to cover for an employee that is long term sick.
GlennR 20 Feb 12:03pm, 20 Feb 2024 74,545 posts	0 GlennR It's a long while since I had to think about this, but having looked it up a company cannot claim SSP unless it is insolvent. It would not be payable for part of a day in any case, and it doesn't kick in until the employee has been off for four days.
Hanneke 20 Feb 1:01pm, 20 Feb 2024 120,277 posts	0 Hanneke When I had Lyme many years ago and we still had our gallery, a ltd company that employed us, I simply got paid and worked what I could when I could. This was a huge burden, but there were no other options! We have always paid all our employees properly if/when they fell on hard times and always been flexible on the drs/dental appointments and sick child situations. As a result, our employees always went above and beyond as they realised being flexible both ways worked really well. I, the director, would go man the gallery when the manager had a sick child. The manager in turn would abandon her Sunday lunch with family for a gallery emergency. It swings both ways. NEVER did it occur to me to dock pay for sickness or medical stuff. Mind, no-one ever took advantage so there wasn't much of it.
GlennR 20 Feb 2:15pm, 20 Feb 2024 74,548 posts	0 GlennR Thankfully I don't work at the kind of place that would even ask. Or indeed notice, most of the time. ION I have just applied for my bus pass!