Season of sick leave

It is flu season. Again.

Sahara dust, which up until 20 years ago was unknown, is so thick that from the Hololo Mountain Road in St Ann’s you cannot see the shoreline today. Times have changed, the environment has changed.

In years past, Trinis came up with names for the flus that went around two or three times every year. There was the lockjoint because it just never seemed to finish. There was the bird flu that just flew in and out and the swine flu that left you snorting like a pig. Everybody got one or another – sniffed, coughed, hacked, went to bed for a couple of days, complained and got over it.

The WHO never said a word and the Ministry of Health didn’t get into it. Mothers and grandmothers that believed in wonder of the world, black sage tea and zebapique dosed you down for what needed to be dosed. I remember shining bush tea. They worked or they didn’t but you did what you were told. I drank hibiscus leaf tea for chickungunya, rubbing Vicks on my chest, on the soles of my feet and under my nose at bedtime. After a few days, I always got better.

But it was a world-wide phenomenon. In Europe it hit the headlines because of the way an Italian deputy public prosecutor felt about the reputation his country’s public service had for poor service to the public, for bureaucratic torpor and absenteeism due to the "flu", starting with the post office. That was before the internet had taken over, and Italy's postal service had a reputation as being among the world’s slowest.

In Trinidad and Tobago, it may have taken two years for a packet of documents to be mailed from one judicial office to another, so that a prosecution for murder could not be processed: something to do with the wrong copying machine being used but murders are hardly ever brought to trial, or convicted anyway, so no one in charge of anything noticed, for an entire decade, we were told.

That, however was peanuts compared to Italy’s public service where four million people subject to repeated flu epidemics were employed. This unhealthy medical atmosphere appeared to have improved miraculously when Luciano Infelesi, the deputy public prosecutor, who got fed up with the notion that the public payroll was treated like a lifelong annuity.

In Italy, public prosecutors have the power to investigate and indict. Back in 1980, Italy began to jail public servants, and some private employees for taking unauthorised leave from work. Among other things the campaign cured the “flu epidemics”.

Their police chief, Gianni Carnevale, found 90 doctors that had issued phony sick-leave certificates to public servants. One physician, the head of the gynaecology unit at Rome’s Palestrina hospital was arrested for signing in for hundreds of hours that he never worked. Of course, our doctors would never do that. His plumber was arrested. In exchange for installing a water heater in the physician’s home, he was given "sick certificates" worth 90 days leave. Of course that was not the same as the scams used here for quarantine certificates during the covid pandemic. People got leave if they just lived with someone or went to cricket with someone who had tested positive. One guy I heard about went on covid-related leave five times.

In Naples, Alfonzo Perrella, a policeman, while on vacation, got a job playing piano in the lobby of the Nicosia Hilton in Cyprus. For two months he entertained tourists while drawing full pay and benefits back in Naples. His medical certificates claimed he was suffering from nervous exhaustion.

Luigi Cinotta, a worker in the Palermo Health Department took off for a full five years without even bothering to apply for sick leave. His friendly supervisor covered for him while he ran his family’s furniture store.

And at the Fiumicino airport, the post office there, which in those days handled most of Italy’s international mail, the police inspector in charge of attendance investigations found only four of the 49 workers on the job. The rest were out driving taxi, tending bar or just collecting full pay. Within three months 33 public employees had gone to jail for fraud because collecting pay for no work is fraud, as everyone knows. In those three months 400 people had been charged with defrauding the state and had earned criminal records, with all that implied.

Government offices were where Italians once lined up for hours, and sometime days, waiting to be attended to. Sound familiar? Not any more. Now no one leaves work three hours early, or comes in two hours late.

One ministry found that they do not have enough desks for everyone employed there, and complained to a reporter at the popular Panorama magazine that, “for thirty years the ministry doorsteps have not been crossed before 9.30 am.”

Sounds familiar?  Now, at 8 am they are milling with employees and with everyone trying to get to work on time and there are traffic jams. Street food vendors around state buildings complained that they had lost business.

The communist mayor of Rome at the time, Ugo Vetere, was quoted in the press as saying that Infelesi,“was being perhaps a bit too zealous and frightening even loyal public servants after an estimated three people a day were being jailed for malingering.”

He said: “If a worker absents himself unjustifiably, he should be sacked, not jailed.”

Now there’s a thought.