Television presenter Steph McGovern has revealed that a Gen-Z worker asked her for a paid day off in order to get a tattoo because it would help her ‘mental health’.
The former BBC host said the young employee tried to justify the request by saying it was for a ‘medical appointment’ and that it was important.
‘A lot of young people work in the businesses I have and recently one of the employees wanted a paid day off work to get a tattoo,’ she told her co-host Robert Peston on The Rest Is Money podcast on Thursday.
‘So when we said you’ll need to take that from your annual leave they said, ‘No because it’s a medical appointment. It’s for my mental health, it’s really important to me.’
Ms McGovern said she felt obliged to give them the day off over fears she would be cancelled or the employee would hurt themselves.
‘The fundamental problem is everything has been medicalised now,’ she told added. ‘So, it is really hard for as an employer to accommodate everyone’s needs.
‘It’s really hard to work out genuine needs and she might genuinely think she needed that for her mental health and who are we to decide that or not?
‘So you have to treat everyone the same because you have no choice’.
Television presenter Steph McGovern has revealed that a Gen-Z worker asked her for a paid day off in order to get a tattoo because it would help her ‘mental health’
Ms McGovern said she felt obliged to give them the day off over fears she would be cancelled or the employee would hurt themselves
But Mr Peston, political editor for ITV News, replied: ‘You’re not treating everyone the same because none of your other employees are going to come to you with that kind of request.’
Ms McGovern admitted that she thought employees who ask for such unusual requests were ‘taking the p**s’ but felt she couldn’t be ‘the judge’ of what was a real mental illness.
In another instance, she shared how another young employee refused to tidy up at the end of a shift because they felt the role was ‘too triggering’.
‘You end up trying to work your way through all of this without offending everyone with all these conditions and things which are medicalised,’ she added.
Earlier this week it was revealed that one in ten working-age people in the UK are now claiming at least one type of health or disability benefit.
These figures are up by a third compared to five years ago with the biggest rise in claimants among young people, with 1.2 million under 25 saying they are too sick to work.
Mental health is said to be one of the main reasons people are leaving work, according to a survey by PwC
The Prime Minister admitted that reforms were needed to stop young people being ‘stuck in a world of benefits’ as the welfare bill has gone ‘through the roof’.
In efforts to save £5billion, Sir Keir Starmer planned to make it harder to claim disability benefits which was met with backlash from his MPs.
