Over 100,000 People Have Pledged To Chuck A Sickie This Friday
Over 100,000 people have pledged to chuck a sickie this Friday, after The Chaser declared June 28 National Sickie Day.
“Study after study has shown that having a sickie when you’re sick is good for society,” says an ad for The Chaser’s National Sick Day. “But what if you don’t know whether you’re sick or not?” The answer, of course, is to stay home “just in case”. Better safe than sorry, after all.
The Chaser is urging all Australians to lie down and take the day this Friday, having unilaterally dubbed June 28 National Sickie Day to “help raise awareness for sickies”.
This week, comedian Mick Molloy was named as National Sick Day’s official ambassador, The Chaser citing his “idolence, lack of reliability” and tendency to “[leave] colleagues in the lurch” as embodying everything the sickie stands for.
“People always say to me, ‘Mick, what’s the key to your success?'” said Molloy in a press release. “It’s not because I’m so good looking. It’s not because of my dapper sense of style. It’s because I was prepared to stand up and take lots of sickies, even when everyone around me was depending on me to turn up.”
Though National Sickie Day is mostly just a joke honouring a great Australian tradition, there is a slightly more serious side to the very unofficial holiday.
“A lot of people just think it’s awesome, but there are a lot of people contacting us telling us they don’t get sickies at all,” said comedian and National Sickie Day executive director Charles Firth. “It turns out 40 percent of workers get no sick leave. It’s a disgrace.”
“If Scott Morrison is doing anything with the workplace laws, this is it. There should be a national sick leave scheme so that every Australian has access to paid sick leave. After all it’s the most Australian of all the different types of leaves.”
“I think we might have accidentally organised a general strike.”
At time of writing, nearly 119,000 people had taken the pledge to chuck a sickie this Friday. Of course, whether they actually go through with it is another matter. I clicked to take the pledge, but that was only so I could see how many other people had as well. I don’t work on Fridays anyway, though I’ll be doing nothing in solidarity.
It’s easy to take the pledge on the National Sickie Day website. Explaining it to your boss is a different matter.