this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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I think the reason we cap sick leave at the moment is because it is employer funded. It would be unreasonable to burden a business with paying for the long-term illness of someone just because they happened to be an employee when they got sick.
When ACC was first set up, the working group that put it together had actually recommended that non-inury sickness be covered as well, but it was not implemented because of the political situation of the time.
If we move the burden of supporting workers who become ill from individual employers, then I think it makes the argument for long-term or indefinite sick leave a lot more palatable.
Aaah that's so interesting. Would have been a radically different system.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see a proposal for this. If you're gonna do it, the first step might not be to push all sick leave onto ACC but instead do something like continuous sick leave of more than 30 days is covered by ACC (perhaps under ACC rules, 80% of pay up to a cap I think is how it works). Basically make ACC for all long term sick leave not just accidents. It seems a reasonable starting point, and is an easier jump to covering all sick leave.
The benefit of this is you don't have to mess with the current employer funded system yet, you can leave it in place for the time being while still having better support for people who get cancer or whatever.
I'm not sure what this would do to ACC levies, but it would be interesting to at least see it calculated and considered.
They would have to cap ACC sick leave though or you would end up with people like me on the books, and 80% of my former salary, or anyone' really, is a lot more than 50% of minimum wage.
I guess if it was built into ACC levies as well it would work though.
You could probably adjust the levys, but maybe you wouldn't do 80% initially. But if you did, you'd probably disrupt the income protection insurance industry. I wouldn't mind paying higher ACC levy's and not having to pay income protection insurance.
What you could do to avoid too much disruption is adjust the levies and then cover everyone for a percentage but with max and mins.
The people who have income protection probably have a large overlap with those who have health insurance. They tend to be higher income, so if the cap were low, they would still need income protection insurance.
That way people who are in new jobs, and casual contract workers, are still covered.
Yes that would be a more palatable way to do it. If it can replace benefits for some people the savings could be fed into the scheme as well, to limit the levy increase.
That's a good point. I think long term it could even save money. So many people go into work with a bad back or whatever and damage themselves much worse.