What to Do When the Boss Won’t Let You Leave

Suppose:

• You’ve been working for a few hours, and your back suddenly feels very tight. You fear an injury if you lift anything. You want to leave work and go directly to your chiropractor, but your boss says no.
• You wake up with a throbbing headache. By the time you get to work, your throat hurts and your nose is running. Instead of going inside, you phone your foreman. He tells you he can’t be short a single person today, and if you don’t come in you’re fired.
• You slept poorly. That morning, you feel groggy, and can’t think straight. Your attention wanders. Your coworker stops you just before you nearly make a fatal mistake. You tell your boss you aren’t fit for work, and need to go home. He tells you to “man up.”

What should you do? In each of these circumstances, you are a danger to yourself and others. Is your boss correct to act as if you’re a crybaby for wanting to take yourself off the work crew?

One of the lessons learned from Covid-19 was the macho culture of going to work no matter how bad you feel is not acceptable social behavior. It endangers other people by bringing illness to them.

Yes, generally you should “tough it out” if you are a little under the weather. All of us have days when we aren’t at our peak. But if you are so dog tired you can’t think clearly, you have a duty to your family, your coworkers, your company, and yourself to remove yourself from the workplace. The same ethic applies if you exhibit signs of illness.

Yes, bosses count on workers to be there. But a worker in an unsafe state is no different from a workplace with unsafe conditions. The safety risk can’t be brushed aside. If your boss doesn’t understand this, escalate the issue until you get to a manager who does.

If you are a supervisor, be on the lookout for subordinates who think they have to “man up” regardless of the risk to themselves or others. Sending someone home need not be a disciplinary action. It should be followed up with a discussion about preventing a recurrence.

What about employees who abuse this policy? Though unlikely, that can happen. If an employee is repeatedly needing to be sent home due to being tired or in some other way unfit for work, that is a different issue from sending someone home due to a rare and random occurrence.

You could simply count it toward their sick days, and that puts a cap on things. If an employee fakes it just to go hunting or to a ball game, that also is a different matter that is already covered by existing sick leave policy.

An employee who is unreliable, for whatever reason, should be dealt with per the company’s policy regarding unreliable employees. Being unreliable and being on the job is worse than being unreliable and being sent home, because the former endangers everyone else on the job.