– We are sitting with five tonnes in our hands and up to a hundred people in and out of the bus in one trip. Then it’s up to me to be fit and healthy and make sure you get where you’re going safely. Trude Sande is a bus driver and chief shop steward in the bus company Tide. She belongs to one of the professions in the country where sickness absence is the highest. On Tuesday evening, Sande takes part in “The Debate” on news, where the current sick pay scheme will be discussed. She is strongly critical of tightening the current system, which several people have advocated recently. – We didn’t choose to become bus drivers because the pay is high. A 20 percent cut in wages will have major consequences. It will be as if they are stealing part of my salary.Trude SandeBus driver Best in the world Norway is the only country in the world that offers full pay during illness for a whole year. At the same time, sickness absence has skyrocketed, and is the highest in 15 years. Venstre has proposed that you should receive full sick pay for the first six months you are sick, but that it is then reduced to 80 per cent. Doctor and actor Anders Danielsen Lie will tighten even more. To the journal Minerva, he says that sick pay should be cut from day one. The OECD believes that the Norwegian scheme is controversial, and puts the high sickness absence in direct connection with it. How cuts can affect In order to find out what a cut of 20 per cent will amount to in practice, we have taken a closer look at the average salary in some of the occupations with the highest sickness absence. If you take the average sickness absence for each occupation as a starting point, the employees would lose the following over the course of a year: Health worker: NOK 9,140 Kindergarten teacher: NOK 9,021 Bus driver: NOK 7,050 Warehouse worker: NOK 6,280 Hotel receptionist: NOK 5,270 – Immediately it will create an economic challenge for us, you can feel pressured to go to work, even if you are not healthy enough to do so, says bus driver Trude Sande. Published 24.09.2024, at 21.12 Updated 24.09.2024, at 21.15
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