‘Half of the workers who are home from work sick do not have anything medically wrong with them, health and safety officials say in Saturday’s Trouw.

Other causes of absenteeism range from disputes with colleagues, failure to get promotion or a baby that does not stop crying, the paper said.

The company doctors’ association NVAB puts the figure even higher. It estimates 70% to 80% of sick days are due to non-medical causes.

On an average day, some 4% of Dutch workers are off sick and this can be reduced to 2% if employers did more to look beyond medical and physical symptoms, the health and safety officials say.

Talk

‘Line managers often know what is going on at home or in the office but don’t dare to raise the issue,’ Thea Hulleman, from the private health and safety firm Zorg van de Zaak, told the paper.

‘That is where things start going wrong. Talk to the worker concerned because the problem won’t go away by itself. And if no action is taken, they could end up really ill.’

NVAB chairman Jurriaan Penders told Trouw that few workers are actually conning their employer. ‘Most people who report in sick are dealing with issues that make them feel incapable of working,’ he said.

A sick employee costs a company on average between €200 and €400 a day for sick pay, a replacement and lost production, the paper said.