In 2016, employees in the private sector did not work on 14,1% of the official working days due to holiday, sick leave, excused and unexcused absence, revealed the analysis of the Central Statistical Office. On the average, employees were absent from their workplace for 39.1 days in 2016.

The number of working days lost due to sick leave was almost the double in the case of blue-collar workers compared to white-collar employees. At enterprises employing minimum 5 people, white-collar workers worked three days more than manual workers in general.  

The larger number of workers an enterprise employs, the more is the average number of days lost due to sick leave.  While an average employee of an enterprises employing 5–49 persons was on sick leave only for 3.8 days on the average (manual workers 4.6 days,  non-manual workers 2.6 days), the average length of sick leave of workers of enterprises with 50–249 employees  was already 8.7 days (10.4 and 5.7 days respectively). This figure, however, is much lower than the 11.2 days typical of enterprises employing at least 250 people (14 and 7.1 days).

A possible reason behind the above phenomenon is that employees are not necessarily loyal to larger companies as these firms are more bureaucratic as a reason of which they are less likely to tolerate the requests for days-off whereas at smaller, family-like enterprises, employers are more prone to grant employees’ requests.