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If you live in certain countries in the world, you’ll know the feeling. You wake up with a bad stomach or can barely speak out loud to your partner or kids because your sinuses are swollen and your voice is gone. And yet, even though all you want to do is go back to sleep, you know you need to stay awake until the office opens so that you can call your boss and explain why you won’t be making it in today. Then, when that ritual is finally over, you can sleep off your illness, safe in the knowledge that you’re getting paid to rest up, and that your job will be waiting for you when you get back.

For folk in other parts of the globe, however, things are very different. Because if you live in a country without sick leave, or with poor workers rights policies, you might find yourself hauling your sick body into work, taking as many vitamins as you can, and just hoping that you get through the day so that you can crash back into your bed. That’s the case in plenty of countries, where to miss a day of work is not only frowned upon as a mild inconvenience, it’s a punishable offence.

Of course, that’s not right at all. But for the server in this story, it’s the reality.

Read on to find out what happened here.

Quietly fired for calling in sick

I’ve been working as a server for the past two months. It’s my first serving job so a lot of the unwritten rules I don’t really know yet.

I was doing pretty well for my first serving job, but recently I made a mistake with an order and my manager got really mad at me telling me I’m moving slow and how everybody’s faster than me (everyone else there has five or more years of experience).

Since then I have been trying my best to do better and go faster, and I think I have.

But last week I called in sick for three days because of my sinus infection, and the manager said it was OK since it was raining and she was gonna cut people anyways.

But things took a downward turn from there.

Now that I see I’m only scheduled once for the next two weeks.

I posted about it on the server Reddit and everybody keeps telling me how calling in sick is the worst mistake you can make as a new server, and how I should’ve gone anyways.

A lot of people are telling me the restaurant sees me as unreliable, but I fail to see how I’m unreliable for calling in sick when I am actually sick? Everyone is sharing stories about how coughing and sneezing is nothing and I should just suck it up.

Reading the comments made me realize exactly what I don’t want to become.

This part of hustle culture is not only unhealthy, it’s completely exploitative too.

A little sniffle is one thing, but if you’re genuinely sick, you should not be going into work – let alone being penalised for doing so.

No one wants their server to be sick – it’s a quick way to spread the illness around a whole town.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person agreed that going to work sick as a server should not be allowed.

While others suggested friendlier career paths for this worker.

Meanwhile, this Redditor explained how much better things can be in other parts of the world.

The stance of folk being fired for calling in sick isn’t just unfair, it’s downright exploitative. Common sense would say that you don’t want your workers coming in sick, because then the other workers – and even the customers – will get sick, and you won’t be able to run the business at all. However, if you live in a country with such hostile working practices that no one would call in sick anyway, there’s no issue for the terrible management. Morally, however, they’re absolutely abhorrent.

Not only should it be illegal to treat your staff this way – as, indeed, it is in Europe – workers should be entitled to pay when they’re sick, because why would you want them to spread their germs around? It’s better for the company for them to spend a day tucked up in bed, healing up. But then, in an industry in which staff aren’t even paid a proper wage and instead made to rely on tips to get by, the likelihood of servers actually being treated like human beings is a lot to ask. Restaurants need to do better.