Long-term sick leave penalises professional trajectories

Source: Studies and Results No. 938, October 2015 Author: Thomas Barnay, Julie Favrot, Catherine Pollak Among private sector employees who were arrested for more than one month in the year due to illness, 15 % of women and 11 % of men were unemployed or inactive the following year (as opposed to 7 % and 4 % of employees who did not have sick leave respectively). This is not only due to a lower quality of jobs held by people in poor health. It shows a penalising effect of sick leave on occupational trajectories, both for women and men. This effect is all the more pronounced since the period spent on sick leave is long. Maternity leave is more often followed by a year of inactivity than long-term sick leave, but most women who remain in employment after birth resume uninterrupted work. When they return to work, the former unemployed and the inactive have fewer sick leave than other employees in employment, indicating that they anticipate the risks of degraded work trajectories associated with these stoppages.