Article content continued

“Sick days should be for sick people,” said Ms. MacLeod, the MPP for Nepean-Carleton. “Sick days aren’t for shoe shopping, they aren’t for days at the beach.”

People are mad and it’s use them or lose them

One TDSB high school teacher said she had not seen any increase in colleagues taking sick days at her school. But she said the reason why teachers elsewhere may be using more of them is because they feel betrayed by the provincial government’s elimination of the bank and — for teachers with less than 10 years’ service — only paying them a small portion of what they’d banked in good faith.

“People are mad and it’s use them or lose them,” said the teacher, adding colleagues at her school kidded her for not using all of her sick days this year. “They said,’ You just gave back those days to the corrupt Liberal government.’ [The government] basically broke a contract in mid-stream, and what’s to stop them from doing it again?”

The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario said it did not have anyone available to speak to the issue Wednesday. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation referred the matter to its Toronto union local, which did not return calls.

Under their latest contract, Ontario teachers receive 11 short-term sick days, down from a previous standard of 20, with a provision for another 120 days at 90% salary. Human resources experts say there are no industry-wide averages for sick day entitlements. But a study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses showed private sector employees claimed an average of 8.9 sick days per year, compared to 12.9 sick days in the public sector. The difference amounted to $3.5-billion in paid wages.

Howard Seiden, a professor specializing in sick days and absenteeism in the University of Toronto’s faculty of medicine said teachers are probably taking extra days off because of frustration over cutbacks to their previous sick day program.

“They are taking what they can get,” he said. “I used to call it an entitlement disorder.”

National Post, with files from Jessica Vitullo and Alexandra Bosanac