Merrill Lynch is no longer the employer of choice for the slackers of the world....  From the category of "I can't believe I missed this" comes news that Merrill Lynch has cut the number of sick days available for its 60,000+ workers from 40 (yes, forty) to 3.    John Hollon's blog at Workforce.com tipped me off to this last night.  From John's blog:

"This may sound like a big change, but a Merrill Lynch spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that the new sick day guidelines are just a "minor policy adjustment," adding: "We’re trying to reduce the number of people taking every Friday off in July." The policy changes, according to the spokesperson, simply bring Merrill Lynch sick policy in line with that of its competitors.

Yes, this may simply be a change to stay competitive for Merrill Lynch, but I was struck by the nuttiness of enacting a new corporate-wide policy for 60,000-plus employees rather than dealing head-on with what seems to be a more basic problem: a raft of workers calling in "sick" so they could take three-day weekends during the summer. Why didn’t Merrill management just deal with that issue directly?"

Fair comments from John.  My take in addition to John's thoughts?  What is a Fortune 500 company doing offering up 40 sick days across the enterprise for to begin with?  Is that a by-product of the horse and buggy era, when a dose of Tuberculosis could put you out on a more frequent basis?

In any event, Merrill looks a little lean on the sick day front at 3 days.  Data from Mercer reports the average company provides 8.1 sick days a year and the average employee takes 5.2 of those.  No question Merrill had a situation on their hand at 40 days, but they could have done more to protect themselves in the court of public opinion, etc.   Seems like a good time to move to a PTO policy and roll all the time into one bucket (making sure they had enough to still position themselves as an employer of choice in this area) to manage the spin.