According to a news item on the BBC, entitled "Sickies 'make up 12% of absences'", we are a bunch of slackers and it is costing the country dear.
"Overall workplace absence, including genuine illness, cost the economy about £13.4bn in 2006, the CBI added.
Workers took an average of seven days off sick in 2006, it said.
This was about half a day more than in the previous year and equated to the loss of 175 million working days."
Which just goes to show how lacking in imagination the BBC is. Not that it stops there, the entire news media ran the same shoddy statistics.
'Costing the economy' is an odd notion, since money just moves between different pockets.
Try this for a different spin, taking the flanerie.org approach to life:
Economy Boosted by Workplace Welfare
New figures show that 750,000 workers would lose their jobs if workplace sickness absence was reduced to zero, increasing the jobless rate from 5.5% to 8.0% of the workforce.
Economists warn that such a dramatic increase in unemployment could push the economy into deep recession by reducing retail sales and triggering a house price collapse.
See? It just takes some lateral thought rather than being solely focused on profit at the expense of common sense.