The following is from a recent email by the Diord Corp Human Resources manager Tobor Technologies found that mental health problems and mental illness were responsible for about 15 percent of employee sick days Tobor amended its employee insurance pla

The argument that Diord Corp. has to implement a similar insurance plan as Tobor Technologies did, in order to reduce employee absenteeism and increase productivity, is not logically convincing since it ignores certain crucial assumptions.

First of all, the argument assumes that the sample of the employees' mental problem and illness days is large enough to safely conclude that the 15% employees' sickness is representative and more important than physical illness which owns the rest 85% of the employees absenteeism. However, there is no report on the total number of employees that are working in Tobor Technologies corporation nor any report on the total number of last year's sick days used by employees in Diord Corp., in order to safely conclude that it is trully a notable percentage increase.

Secondly, the argument assumes that there is a causal correlation between the hiring of the on-site phychologist and the 10% decline of the ill employees. The author does not provide any information regarding the actual number of employee visits to the phychologist and does not even verifies that the system that allowed workers to schedule confidential counseling appointments was actually used by the employees nor that the phychologist was able to cure their illness. Were the workers even informed about it? We cannot make any solid assumptions here.

Finally, the argument has an aggressive analogy assumption that, besides the fact that the author does not enumerate the percentage increase in employee sick days over the past two years in Diord Corp., the insurance plan which Tobor Technologies implemented will work for Diord Corp. as well. There is no reference regarding the nature of the primary labor type in neither corporation nor how labor correlates with the illnesses and whether the employees of both corporations are working in an identical environment that could be responsible for their illnesses. Hence, since no further information is given regarding the major cause of sickness in Diord Corp., the assumption that the major type of Diord's employees illness is physical,as it was in Tobor, negates the usefulness of a phychologist in assisting Diord's employees.

Thus, the argument is not completely sound. The evidence in support of the conclusion, that Diord Corp. should apply the same insurance plan and counseling program as Tobor Tech to reduce employee absenteeism and cause an increase in productivity, does little to prove that conclusion, since it does not address the assumptions already raised. Ultimately, the argument might have been strengthened if the author could have provide a precise number of sick employees, evidence that the workers actually used the system to make appointments with the phychologist and that employees's illness in Diord Corp was of mental nature in order to justify the hiring of a phychologist.