A claim by IBEC that absenteeism costs businesses €1.5 billion a year was dismissed yesterday as "bogus" by the general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Mr David Begg.
The employers' body based its claim on a survey of 557 organisations, which found that workers are absent for an average of 7.8 days each year. Extrapolated to include all of those in employment, this represented a loss of 14 million working days, it said.
Mr Begg said, however, it was incorrect to suggest that Irish industry suffered from a serious absenteeism problem. "In fact, Irish workers take the second-lowest number of sick days in the EU. We take less than half the number of sick days claimed by the Germans and one-third of those taken in Finland," he said.
Irish workers also took fewer sick days than their counterparts in Britain, Austria and the Netherlands.
Those findings, he said, resulted from an EU-wide survey that covered more than 16,000 workers across the 15 "pre-accession" states. They were published last month in the Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine.
Mr Begg said IBEC had made its "remarkable claims" based on a survey of "just a few hundred Irish businesses", and then extrapolated from that. "This is dubious science, to say the least. Ireland does not have an absenteeism problem - the IBEC study is bogus.
"Perhaps they would be better served studying why Irish workers have some of the lowest holiday entitlements in Europe, or are unable to take parental leave because it is unpaid."
Only Greece had a lower rate than Ireland for sick days in the EU-wide survey cited by Mr Begg. The highest rates were found in the Netherlands and Finland.
In the IBEC survey, more than half of the respondents did not consider they had a problem with absenteeism. Almost a quarter of those surveyed said, however, that many male absences were not due to genuine ill health. About 40 per cent of short-term absences occurred around the weekend, according to the survey results.
About 12 per cent of those surveyed cited alcohol and alcohol-related illness as being a cause of short-term absence for males. The equivalent figure for females was 4 per cent.
