An employment lawyer warns of cases where you can't travel while on sick leave: "The company can fire you without compensation."

When a worker is on sick leave due to an injury or illness, regardless of the cause, there is a common belief that this condition prevents them from enjoying activities intended for employed workers, such as traveling and vacationing. This, as is almost always the case with this type of belief, is only true in certain cases.

This is what labor lawyer Juanma Lorente has explained on his TikTok profile. The expert assures that, as a general rule, "you can travel while on sick leave," but " be careful not to do anything that will further ruin the reason you're on sick leave ."

Lorente reports that any employee wishing to travel while on sick leave must meet an essential requirement: "The most important thing to keep in mind when you're on sick leave is that you can't engage in activities that will delay your recovery or harm the condition you're supposedly suffering from."

Lorente gives examples to explain how this premise applies to workers' real lives: "If you have difficulty walking because you have serious knee problems, going on a trip isn't the most logical thing to do. When you go on a trip, you do some sightseeing, walk, visit places... and if your knee is like that and you can barely walk, then it's normal not to go on a trip."

In those cases, Lorente points out, "if you're supposed to have that knee and you're caught sightseeing in a city, the company can fire you without compensation ."

It would be a different matter if, for example, the worker suffered a shoulder problem or had their arm in a sling. In that case, Lorente affirms, "going on a trip won't delay your recovery either," and "you'll be doing the same thing here as you would in Greenland." The lawyer goes further, explaining that in cases of anxiety or depression, "it may even be beneficial to get out of the house and visit new places to recover."

For all these reasons, the lawyer asserts that " if you are caught traveling while suffering from anxiety or a shoulder problem, the company, in theory, would have no legal reason to fire you ."

The key to everything, Lorente summarizes, is that ultimately the trip itself "is not the important thing" and what really matters is "that the activities you're going to do on the trip, or even at home, don't delay your healing."