How often do you take personal days?

[Inspired by Reggio]

I think one of the things we need to remember is that the Employment Standards set out in most problems are set out for a REASON ... we should not feel GUILTY for wanting to include these same rights and standards in our contracts - just because we are self employed does not mean we should be risking our health and mental well being for clients!

Not sure about other provinces - but in Ontario the law states that employees need to have a minimum of 10 days of vacation per year and that at least 5 of those days much be consecutive days off because research shows this is BEST for the health and mental well being of employees!

In addition employees are to receive 4% vacation pay to be paid out either on each pay cheque or annually in a lump sum which can either be on a certain date for ALL employees or at the time of vacation as long as it is clear in the employee contract which manner this will be.

I do not know about other provinces but in Ontario they recently added 10 EMERGENCY/FAMILY days to the rights of employees where employees can take off sick or due to family being sick without 'reprimand' because many companies did not offer any 'sick days or family leave' and employees with young children or employees with aged parents who needed assistance were getting FIRED for taking time off to take care of family - this adds to the mental and emotional stress on families trying to balance work and personal life and leads to more illness and time off work and financial crisis and well as a society we need to SUPPORT each other in times of illness and crisis not force them to choose between work and family or keeping their job ... and it is SAD that the government had to regulate common sense into businesses but such is the way of corporate greed over supporting workers!

My point being that IME providers who NEVER take time off work to recharge their batteries specially when sick, who do not take time off to take care of themselves or their children and put the needs of CLIENTS above the needs of their family either end up VERY SICK themselves from the physical burn out it causes or they just plain burn out due to resentment at being overworked and undervalued as they watch CLIENTS taking ME days to go shopping or clean their house and so forth but complaining about how inconvenient it is if the provider ever has to take time off!

I get the guilt - I really do ... it is inherent in what we do - we take care of the needs of others often at the expense of our own ... I am not immune even with personal days worked into my contract - I suck at taking SICK days ... in March I worked for weeks with a nasty cough that kept me up all night long coughing and aching all over from said coughing because I did not want to take time off to 'rest' because there is so many months left before December and what is something 'worse' comes along like a stomach flu where I REALLY could not work and so forth so I pushed through .... and I paid the price - pneumonia in both lungs and it moved into my kidneys too boot and I ended up in emergency room on the Friday night - almost hospitalized cause my oxygen levels were so low but stayed sick in bed all weekend and even then ended up taking two more days off to boot - cause I either had a reaction to the antibiotics or with my immunity so low I caught a stomach bug while in the emergency room waiting on Xrays and on top of the pneumonia was vomiting and had diarrhea .... in reality I likely would have avoided that if like my spouse I just took a day off and slept when I felt the cold coming 'on' so that my body could use its resources to fight the infection instead of pushing myself so hard!

Ultimately if we do not take care of OURSELVES we are useless to take care of anyone else!