These guys really miss the Gestapo

Thanks for sharing. I ended up writing a whole essay on this article because it got me so riled up lol. This is essentially class warfare. Blaming the workers for the measly 0.3% contraction in GDP instead of telling companies what they can do to retain employees. And if you complain, the big bad detective is going to get you fired, so better not take any more sick days!

Trust the Germans to invent the lamest kind of Pinkerton imaginable.

Someone near and dear to me works at a public school. They are chronically underfunded and understaffed and under constant threat of new rounds of layoffs. This is the situation for the entire municipality where the official title of the municipal budget has been "The Cuts Catalogue" for at least a decade.

As a result municipal workers, teachers, elder care workers, librarians, child care workers etc. have an alarmingly high number of sick days. The municipality is aware of the problem and has come up with a solution: If an employee has had three or more periods of being away from work due to themselves or their children being sick they are called for a so-called "care meeting" where their manager will show how much they care by interrogating the employee on the reason for their sickness. Employees feel this care to be deeply intimidating, especially at a workplace where chronic austerity means that there's always a new round of layoffs looking in the horizon.