Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Sick absenteeism in the civil service cost the Bahraini exchequer some BD4.5 million last year. The Civil Service Bureau says last year 178,000 absent days were recorded with civil servants taking off the equivalent of five years' sick leave a month.
No developing economy can carry on with so much sick absenteeism. But the question here is, how often are the employees who call in sick, really sick? One recent empirical study reports that 78 per cent of all sick time is being used by workers who aren't sick at all.
Of course, employers and co-workers don't want someone in the work place who is coughing, sneezing and passing a virus around. Nor do employers need workers who are too ill to function properly at their job, possibly leading to dangerous and/or expensive mistakes. But, neither do employers need the disruption caused by unneeded absenteeism.
Shaikh Ahmed bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, group human resources general manager of Batelco, which recently organised a seminar on 'Management of Sickness Absence', says: "The amount of time lost through staff absenteeism is a growing problem for all companies in the Kingdom of Bahrain."
Bahrain's economy lost an estimated BD2 billion last year from among seven of the country's biggest private sector employers, as a total of 105,000 days were lost through absenteeism, says Gulf Petrochemical Industries chief medical officer Dr Mohammed Saleh Abdullatif.
He says the latest figures from Bahrain's 22 health centres showed a total of 470,000 workdays were lost in 2007 across all sectors.
Dr Abdullatif says the main culprits for faking sickness were workers who were given jobs by someone influential within a company and therefore felt they were untouchable.
He says the law prohibiting companies from not accepting a certificate provided by a government medical centre should be scrapped.
Company doctors should have the right to reject sick certificate if they feel the case is not genuine, he says.
However, the problem of rising levels of absenteeism is not confined to Bahrain or the Gulf alone.
Sickness absence costs the UK economy over £12 billion a year. Employers generally want to keep sick leave to a minimum, and employees may not always feel able to take time away from work. However, research shows that attitudes to sick leave should be more complex.
It's possible that there are genuine health risks for people if they don't take time to recover.
Workers in the US face a different problem. Roughly 60 million American workers have no paid sick leave, and only a minority can draw pay if they stay home with sick children.
The lack of paid leave is especially acute in this country among low-wage workers, food-service workers and part-timers, among others.
Many other countries do better. According to Dr Jody Heymann, director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University, more than 160 countries ensure that all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness.
But, where does one draw the line? Look at this for instance.
Civil servants in Bahrain could be soon given a week's paid time-off to be with sick family members in hospital.
Parliament approved the Shura Council proposal, but they reduced the proposed time off from a month to a week.
They backed it in spite of strong objection from the government, which said absence through sick leave was already too high and costly.
The government loses BD117 per day and with this law the numbers are set to further increase, thus causing the government more losses.
The extreme case of a country granting a month's time off to accompany sick relatives is Oman.
Other GCC countries disagree with the idea, including Bahrain, because who knows when the patient would be well again.
Dr Abdullatif says whether a workers' sick leave was fake or genuine, there was always a reason for their absence.
This mainly included stress from long hours and excessive pressure from their boss, domestic and personal commitments, drug and alcohol abuse and a lack of vocational training.
Every company should strictly monitor the level of sick leave taken by its employees and have regular meetings with those who are absent.
Incentives, awards and cash prizes should also be given to staff who do not take time off.
