In Germany, where the economy is in crisis, the significant increase in cases of sick leave among workers has become a major cause for concern for company bosses. For Markus Lenz, a private detective, it is manna from heaven.
Never has his agency, which offers services in the field of investigations of workers suspected by their employers of issuing fake sick leave, been in such demand, Lenz himself told Agence France-Presse. He works in Frankfurt, the country's financial capital, BTA reports.
"There are more and more companies that don't want to put up with this anymore", explains Lenz, assuring that he receives up to 1,200 requests for such investigations per year, which is twice as many as in the period a few years ago.
"If someone has 30, 40 or even 100 sick days per year, at some point they become economically uninteresting to their employer", adds the private detective, who has been working in this field since 1995.
From car giants to fertilizer manufacturers, German companies are sounding the alarm about the impact of the high rate of sick leave on Europe's largest economy.
Some company bosses are not shy about talking about it, such as Ola Källenius, CEO of „Mercedes-Benz“, which points out that sick leave is twice as high as in other European countries.
„Tesla“, the Elon Musk group, whose European electric car factory is near Berlin, made headlines when it sent officials to ring the doors of absent workers and check whether their sick leave was genuine.
German workers took an average of 15.1 days of sick leave in 2023, compared to 11.1 days in 2021, according to the national statistics office „Destatis“.
And that trend is expected to intensify in 2024. One of Germany's main health insurance funds – TC - says it paid out an average of 14.1 days of sick leave to German workers in the first nine months of the year, a record.
According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germans missed an average of 6.8 percent of their working hours in 2023 due to illness, which is more than in France, Italy or Spain.
And if detective Markus Lenz is hunting down fraudsters, attributing the increase in sick leave solely to fraud and abuse would be dangerous, emphasizes the Institute for Economic and Social Research of the Hans Büchler Foundation, which is affiliated with German unions. This would mean that real reasons for some of the actual sick leave are not being addressed, says Bettina Kohlrausch, director of research at the institute. She points to factors such as an increase in respiratory infections, stressful working conditions and a weakening of social protection measures.
The aging of the German population, with an increasing proportion of the working population over 55, is also a factor in explaining the high number of sick leave.
In France, official statistics also found that since 2019 there has been an increase in sick leave in the private sector and in companies that have contracts with state institutions, and this does not take into account sick leave related to Covid-19.
Whatever the reasons for this trend, it undoubtedly affects the economic performance of Germany, whose economic model is already in crisis, Klaus Michelsen, an economist at the German Association of Pharmaceutical Research Companies, told AFP.
This federation calculated that the rise in sick leave has led to to a significant reduction in production, without which the German economy would have grown by 0.5 percent, while it actually contracted by 0.3 percent.
This finding was also supported by the Bundesbank, according to which the increase in sick leave, which is relatively high, has slowed economic activity in 2023.
After the pandemic, patients in Germany with mild symptoms can get sick leave from their doctor even by calling them. According to its critics, this measure facilitates abuse.
The phenomenon has also increased due to the more systematic registration of sick leave through the introduction of a new system that allows doctors to automatically transfer sick leave to the health insurance funds to which the patients belong.
As for the fraudsters caught by Markus Lenz, a large number of them use sick leave to work in parallel, he explains. As an example, he points to a husband who helped out in his wife's small business, or an employee who took advantage of extended sick leave to renovate his home.