The German term for “Get well soon” – Gute Besserung – is shortened to “GB”. I can’t imagine such an abbreviation existing in regular usage anywhere else. Whether through weekly emails about colleagues being sick and needing to redistribute tasks within the team, or watching Slack status fill with the regular thermometer-adorned emoji, I very quickly normalised the normalisation of sick leave in Germany.
Now, with post-COVID return-to-office mandates, I’ve renormalised the very real wave of sicknesses that sweep across offices.
I’ll admit I was initially shocked by how often my colleagues called in sick when I moved to Germany. In my first few months of employment, I heard about illnesses previously unbeknown to me – including the curiously vague “circulation problems” (Kreislaufprobleme). I was new to German working culture and didn’t think too much about it. I was simply amused.
Economic impact
Then I thought about back home. During a summer student job at House of Fraser, I once called in sick with a migraine. The very next day, my manager asked me for a doctor’s note. I remember my mum, who worked in an NHS lab, being terrified to call in sick – her boss would give her an unjustifiably tough time for it – even when she could barely get out of bed. This was less amusing.
I have welcomed this more mature and trusting outlook on sick leave. But German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has not – he’s been very publicly criticising “overgenerous” sick leave in Germany and attributing it to the stagnating economy. Germans are supposedly notorious for their number of sick days per year (18.6 days on average in 2025, according to health insurance provider Techniker Krankenkasse), to which Merz has asked “Is that really correct? Is that really necessary?”
While he has since clarified – “Wir unterstellen niemandem Faulheit” (“We are not accusing anyone of laziness”) – the interpretation of his rhetoric has certainly been exactly that: that Germans are lazy, and that this laziness is exacerbating the last two years of stagnating economy.
The normalisation of sick leave
There’s a sickening (mind the pun) high-five culture in the United Kingdom around coming to work with no voice or suspected tonsillitis – for example. It’s a strange kind of stoicism and heroism that I really can’t stand. Just stay at home. If you must work – and you can – work from home.
When people in the UK do call in sick, it’s accompanied by an unspoken suspicion: are you really ill? You then spend the whole day worrying about whether colleagues think you’re lying – as if being sick were as implausible as “the dog ate my homework”.
But I’ve observed an absence of guilt for calling in sick in Germany. There’s been no mistrust, no suspicious questioning, no paranoia about what colleagues might be saying behind your back. Legally, your employer cannot ask the reason, nor require you to work or attend meetings – and in my experience, this has always been respected.
What a sense of psychological safety this culture creates. To be able to call in sick and actually be able to rest, instead of dreading the work you will have to catch up on. Instead of dreading the justification to your boss and team. I feel grateful to have emigrated to a culture built on this kind of trust and maturity, one that seems to think long-term. But of course, the problem with trust is that there will always be those who abuse the system. That is part and parcel of designing a system for the greatest good.
Yet I’d hate to see this culture dismantled by a chancellor’s policy that denounces sick leave as a drain on productivity.
Is the sick leave diagnosis fair?
Is there faul play going on? Lazy is “faul” in German.
Why are people calling in sick? I can only comment on my first-hand experience along with these facts from a 2026 Techniker Krankenkasse press release.
- Respiratory infections are the reason for most sick leave days in Germany. I became sick more often when I was going into the office post-COVID than pre-COVID when I was going in every day.
- Mental health-related sick leave is at No. 2 and has increased year on year. From my experience again, employees are burning out. From speaking to people in various industries and company sizes, layoffs have meant teams are more streamlined and individuals are doing more work than before to save companies money.
- Musculoskeletal issues are at No. 3 for top reasons for calling in sick. I am sitting longer hours at a desk than ever before in my professional life – and if other people are the same, then it’s hardly a surprise.
Is Merz correct that Germany is taking advantage of this generous sick leave policy? I do believe it is far easier to take guilt-free sick leave here than in the UK. There is typically little consequence from calling sick, which might encourage people to take their liberties with sick leave. But, as I pointed out, these people will always exist in society.
But it’s obvious to me that presence is not the same as productivity, and making it harder for people to call in sick is not going to help the economy grow. Higher turnout at work (whether employees are sick or not sick) is not going to generate higher turnover.
By all means, make it harder to take advantage of the system, but don’t blame sick leave (or part-time work, for that matter) on lack of growth. Some German economists have pointed out that changing tax laws rather than labour regulations might encourage more people to work full-time. Germany’s tax laws do not provide an incentive to work 40 hours a week, according to OECD research.
Someone taking home 2,000 euros a month pays 4.4 cents tax on the euro; at 4,000 euros, that jumps to 13.1 cents.
Some solutions
Having spoken to several entrepreneurs and self-employed people (especially foreigners), I would really suggest Merz considers removing the red tape from the self-motivated people who are willing and ready to innovate and set up new businesses – rather than discouraging them with extensive bureaucracy and wait times. If it is sick days and full-time work he wants, this is precisely the demographic to facilitate.
Another consideration: The number of qualified immigrants who arrive here in Germany, only to find that their qualifications aren’t valid – fully qualified nurses told they must start again as interns, take a salary cut and complete an Ausbildung (training for certification) from scratch – is incredibly wasteful. Germany needs to find a way to better absorb these skilled workers coming in from abroad because they will contribute to the economy.
And the truth is, if we’re going to be working until 67-plus (we’re certainly heading in that direction), I should hope that adequate sick leave is still going to be encouraged for when we need it. If Germany moves towards UK-style suspicion, those who need the sick days will not take them.
That helps no one – not the individual, and not the economy.
––––––––––––
See more about Germany here in Dispatches’ archives.
Sara Vordermeier
Sara Vordermeier is a Hamburg-based freelance writer and editor specialising in sports, technology and culture stories from her life abroad. Her professional writing experience spans more than seven years in the fields of content marketing, organic search trends and journalism.
