You can call it pigskin pox or the pro football flu: More than 17 million workers are expected to call in sick Monday, the day after Super Bowl LIII, according to a survey.
The Workforce Insitute at Kronos Inc., a software company that helps companies with human resources management, commissioned the survey, according to the Washington Post.
The cost of productivity loss, including sick days and time spent discussing the game, could be more than $4 billion, according to an estimate by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement and executive coaching firm, the Post reported.
The company surveyed 1,107 U.S. adults and estimated that around 17.2 million could skip work Monday, based on extrapolations of U.S. workforce data, the report said. That's also the highest number in the five or six times of running the survey since 2005, the paper reported.
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The survey found more than 8 million workers will take a pre-approved day off, but an additional 4.7 million are estimated to take a sick day even though they won't be ill, according to USA Today. The institute also estimated that 3.1 million workers may show up late for work, while 6.3 million may leave work early, the report said.
The survey also said the day after the Super Bowl is the No. 1 sick day every year and a third of all American workers believe it should be considered a national holiday, according to Fox 28 Spokane. The game's evening start time and tendency to last longer than a typical NFL game are likely big factors.
"I'm a former corporate recruiter, and the Monday after the Super Bowl there were always more notable absences," Vicki Salemi, the careers expert at job site Monster.com, told the Post.
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"Both employees and their bosses continue to play hooky the day after the Big Game," said Joyce Maroney, executive director at the Workforce Institute, in a statement obtained by USA Today.
Kronos said employees most susceptible to "Super Bowl Fever" are older members of upper management, while nearly half of the younger junior- and mid-level employees have the most anxiety about missing work known as "The Super Sunday Scaries," FOX 28 reported.
"The Super Sunday Scaries are real: 45 percent of employees aged 18-34 confess they are more likely to have anxiety about going back to work the Monday after the Super Bowl than any other Sunday during the year, which is the highest among any age group," the survey said.
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In 2017, Kraft Heinz Co. pushed to make Super Bowl Monday a national holiday, calling it "Smunday."
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