The entitled young will take any excuse not to show up to work

Britain is sick. Sicker than at any point in the recent past. People are abandoning the workforce in droves: over 2.7million are currently on sickness benefits, up from 2 million in 2019. Hard though this surely is to ignore, politicians keep very quiet about it.

Men, women, the over50s, the under-25s: they’re all staying home in greater numbers than before lockdown. Pupil illness absence has leapt from 4.5 per cent pre-pandemic to 6.9 per cent now.

But perhaps most striking is a new study suggesting that younger office staff are “slacking off ” at least one day a week due to mental-health problems. This is the next generation of workers, on whom our economic future depends, yet they’re failing to work at “full capacity” 50 days a year due to “burnout”, “stress” and “insomnia”.

Only six of these days are taken as formal sick leave, meaning the true state of our sickness crisis may be far worse than the official one. If young people are indeed effectively taking up to 10 additional weeks off work, it will be having a devastating impact on GDP: this study puts the cost at nearly £140 billion a year.

Are British citizens really so much more poorly than they were four years ago, or have Covid lockdowns crushed the work ethic and recalibrated attitudes towards employment? There are good reasons to suspect the latter. Even when Generation Z-ers do show up for work, many claim to be “quiet quitting” and “acting their wage”, euphemisms for doing the bare minimum. Hybrid work often seems to be treated as a necessity rather than a luxury; one exasperated marketing boss recently warned that some graduates are refusing even to come into the office for job interviews.

Many appear dismayed that managers don’t take greater interest in their personal health – as though the very purpose of jobs is to boost employee wellbeing rather than to produce goods and services that others want to buy. And they do so in the knowledge that the UK currently has 900,000 vacancies: employment is, for now, a seller’s market.

Sadly, many young people will indeed be suffering from anxiety or depression. But just as the pandemic blurred the lines between genuine illness and a sniffle, there now seems to be a tendency not to try to distinguish between serious mental ill-health and normal fluctuations in human emotion.

This has been weaponised by trade unions and Britain’s growing army of overmighty HR professionals. Managers can’t get tough with staff for fear they will be accused of discrimination or bullying. Ministers, cowed, skirt the issue. Our incessant pathologising of ordinary behaviours, combined with the fact that there are so many genuine cases, means that “mental ill-health” can never be questioned.

As if this weren’t bad enough, consider what’s coming. Nursery guidance now tells parents that the best place for “unwell” toddlers is at home with mum and dad. Pupils are banished from school premises for a full 48-hours after vomiting, regardless of how well they might feel. Children have – or used to have – remarkable recuperative powers, but school staff have developed a paranoia over bugs, which 30 years ago were shrugged off as part of their natural development.

From a young age, the incentive structure is skewed towards convalescence rather than dosing up and powering through. Children are being raised with a sense of sick-day entitlement and a belief that if they don’t feel 100 per cent, they should stay home. When the inevitable reckoning comes, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.