Hi.

I'd suggest that this would be wholly impossible to manage and well outwith an employers set of responsibilities. How can they prove they've contracted the cold from a colleague and not a family member, fellow bus passenger, person behind them in the queue at the shops? 

Agree it looks like a desperate ploy to defend their absence.

Across many employments I have often seen within the T&C's of employment that employees with communicable diseases (albeit without clear list of diseases) should refrain from attending work.

Unfortunately we have a society which drives presenteeism and senior management who provide a poor example in the work place - one senior manager lurched in to work with a "cold" for two days after a foreign business trip before spending 10 days bed ridden and in doing so condemned half the office to the same fate. To this day we still don't know what form of "virus" it was that made him and the others ill.

As Ian eluded there are some in the general population with suppressed immunity for whom even common colds can be quite debilitating - whilst appreciating on the face of your initial post this sounds like an attempt to divert an absence issue has the employees overall general health been verified e.g. are they on / have they started a course of medication with immuno-supressant side effects?

Unless there are very exceptional circumstances it sounds like appropriate measures for the general population are in place.

Ok this is worse than bunkum but before I go off and list various words to describe it let’s look at the issue.

Firstly the Health and Safety at Work Act only deals with risks and hazards arising out of work, not something that exists in the community at large. So if you are in the medical sector there is a duty to protect staff from infection from patients as that is arising out of work, but no duty if the risk comes from sitting next to someone on the daily commute. The COSHH guidance and ACoP are clear on this. I suppose that you could stretch the requirements of the Health and Safety at Work Act to mean there is a duty of care but the Act is enforceable by the HSE and they decide what they go for as a matter of public policy. I suppose you colleague could take the HSE to court and ask for judicial review but I think he would be wasting his money.

This is not a Health and Safety issue.

There is no way a case (I use that word loosely) for office colds would stand up in any tribunal, federation or employee union - there are just too many ways of catching it considering the "common cold" is common everywhere, hence the name. It would be very hard to contest that it was your company responsible for you getting ill. There is also no clinical way of proving it either. As A Kurdziel said HASAWA relates to hazards and injuries arising from work - I highly doubt you would catch a cold from doing office work (unless you're just trying to get out of it in the first place!!) 

Edited by user 08 May 2018 11:49:32(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified