You wake up Monday morning with a throbbing headache, achy muscles and a hacking cough. Do you miserably trudge into work, likely prolonging your recovery time and exposing your co-workers to infection? Or do you give your body the time it needs to heal, and call in sick? Can you afford to?
For almost 40 percent of the nation's private workforce, the answer to that last question is no. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows only 33 percent of workers earning $10.50 an hour or less have access to paid sick leave, compared with 81 percent of those earning $24.22 an hour or more. This means, perversely, that if you can afford to take an unpaid sick day, you generally don't have to.
Politicians and policy advocates across the country are aware of this squeeze on working families, and paid sick leave bills have been introduced at the city, state, and national levels. Most of these proposals are based on the earned sick time model: Employees must work, say, 30 hours to earn one hour of sick leave. Those earned hours accumulate, eventually, into full paid sick days. All the proposals include a cap on the number of mandated paid sick days. Most require five to nine days a year. Some allow employees to carry over unused sick days from one year to the next.
"The economic climate makes it even more important for lawmakers to act because, in this economy, workers can ill-afford to miss a paycheck or risk the long-term unemployment that often follows losing a job," said Vicki Shabo, Director of Work & Family Programs for the National Partnership for Women & Families. "Workers shouldn't have to put their economic stability and job security on the line every time they get sick. It's bad for business, bad for workers, and bad public policy."
So far, only two U.S. cities have adopted paid sick leave laws. Since 2008, five other cities, as well as 21 states and the U.S. Congress, have considered similar bills. So far, none have passed, because organized business interests have thwarted the proposals, claiming that even the most modest benefits will harm the economy and kill jobs. That scare tactic has proven quite potent in the present climate, with employers fiercely resistant to anything that even hints at additional costs.
Are these claims correct or are the business groups crying wolf? One way to judge is to examine whether places that already have paid sick leave laws are suffering the dire consequences that corporate America warns against. A majority of the world's nations guarantee sick leave benefits, as do Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. (Similar legislation was passed in Milwaukee with 68 percent of the vote, but area business groups sued and a local court overturned it).
In 2006, San Francisco became the first American city to guarantee its citizens the right to paid time off to recuperate from illness. Business groups, spearheaded by the local Chamber of Commerce, lobbied against the ballot measure, which came on the heels of a municipal minimum wage raise and a universal health care law in the city. The business-side arguments evoked the typical "job killer" rhetoric. After voters approved the law by 61 percent, Kevin Westlye, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, told the New York Times, "There's no such thing as a free lunch on something like this," and darkly warned of rising prices and shuttered restaurants.
Four years later, these dire predictions have not come to pass. A recent study by the Drum Major Institute (DMI) shows that San Francisco's employment rate has remained stronger than in any of the five neighboring counties, including wealthy Santa Clara (Silicon Valley). Even the industries where opponents warned that the impact would be harshest - retail, hospitality, and food services - remained stronger, without exception, than their nearby counterparts.
At least 145 nations guarantee working adults some form of sick leave, including rich countries like Germany and Canada, and poorer ones like Indonesia and Senegal. Most of them allow at least one week, and over half ensuring leave of a month or more. A 2006 study in the Journal for Comparative Policy Analysis revealed that there is little, if any, connection between sick pay laws and unemployment levels. A 2009 follow up study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that the duration of European sick leave laws doesn't have any discernible relation to unemployment rates either.
Studies show that paid sick leave is beneficial for employers too. Currently, businesses lose money from high turnover rates caused by illness absences and from the lowered productivity that results from sick employees spreading their germs at work. The Institute of Women's Policy Research found that if all U.S. workers were offered seven days of paid sick leave annually the result would be "a net savings of $8.1 billion a year due to increased productivity and reduced turnover."
Today, even San Francisco business owners have come around. Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of the city's Chamber of Commerce, told the Wall Street Journal that the legislation hasn't stirred up any backlash from his members. And in a June article in Business Week, former doomsayer Westlye, executive director of the restaurant industry's lobby, sounded downright enthusiastic about the bill: "[Paid sick leave] is the best public policy for the least cost. Do you want your server coughing over your food?"
Despite the success of the San Francisco law, business groups continue to use the same tired rhetoric against similar legislative proposals. From California to Connecticut, business groups cry wolf about paid sick leave, and its supposedly catastrophic economic effects.
Our nation's lawmakers would do well to ignore them. Paid sick leave would have a tangible impact on the lives of American families--and politicians. The National Opinion Research Center released a poll in June showing that 86 percent of Americans favored laws guaranteeing paid sick leave. Strong majorities of self-identified Republicans as well as Democrats supported the proposal. Most said they would be more likely to vote for politicians who backed it.
All employees should be able to take time off for their illnesses, not just those lucky enough to have the right job. As the San Francisco experience shows, we can make our economy friendlier to beleaguered workers without harming their employers.
Jake Blumgart is a researcher with the San Diego-based Center on Policy Initiatives' Cry Wolf Project funded by the Ford Foundation and the Public Welfare Foundation. His work has been published by the American Prospect, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Stranger, and Campus Progress. A shorter version of this article was originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow him on Twitter.
Compared to what? The low tax, less regulation, out sourcing economy we have now?
The stunt many companies play now, even those where the average wage is above the $24.22 mark cited in the article, is to lump all paid time off into one a catagory called Paid Time Off.
Vacation, holidays, bereavement, jury duty, sick days, all come out of the same pot. If I become very sick and need two weeks off, then I can say good bye to being off on Labor Day or that trip to Disneyland with the family.
Imagine spending your "vacation" on jury duty?
Conservatives call this stuff welfare, that you are only entitled to a pay check for your labor and nothing else. They cite some passage from the constitution and think it covers labor law, too.
What many rock ribbed capitalists forget is that my labor generates profits for my business beyond the cost of my pay and I have a stake in those profits and that stake is my paid benefits.
Unless you are hurt on the job (involving workers' compensation), these workers can never take a day off with pay. And if you are hurt on the job, many companies try to find a way to fire you or let you go so that they cannot be hit with further workers' compensation claims from you. Some employment places automatically "write you up" for having an accident with any form of injury because it is impossible for someone to have an accident unless they were doing something wrong/dangerous/against policy (or at least that's the company's viewpoint).
This is one of the reasons that raising the social security retirement age for all is such a bad idea. If you have been behind a desk all your life, had the luxury of sick time to take off for medical care, and to recuperate from injuries, surgeries, or simply the flu - then you probably are a lot healthier than a man who has been a plumber for 45 years, and never took a single day of sick leave (no pay) unless it was absolutely necessary. The people in this country who need retirement are those for which it is a goal getting further and further away.
A small employer alreaady takes a financial hit when an employee cannot come to work and to have to pay for wages on top of that seems a little punative to me.
If employeess contribute to their own fund, they won't feel bad when they use it and the employer suffers less as well.
Single payer healthcare would also help.
I'm already contributing to my own health care (higher premiums, deductables, co-pays) my own retirement (401K) and, beginnig in 2011, my own Social Security if the GOP has its way.
If these things are for my benefit, should they be my responsibility, the capitalist asks? If my wages kept pace with my productivity (a KEY component of capitalism,) then there might be an argument there. But with wages stagnant for 40 years the employer, regardless of size) has to chip in for benefits because he is saving on wages.
Of course sick leave should be paid. Where I live we not only has paid sick leave, we also has the right to stay home with sick children 1 or 2 days with pay. On top of that we has 1 year paid parental leave pr child.
We also has 5 weeks vacation regardless of the number of sick leave and a 37 hours working week.
And i t doesn't hurt the economy.
Our average pay is higher than yours, but all the same we has a surplus of export instead of a deficit.
We also has a lower unemloyment rate.
Oh, I almost forgot; about 80% of the work force are members of those "oldfashioned" unions. maybe that has something to do with it.
I'm a small business owner. I'd like to take the day off when I don't feel well and still make money too?
Can we add that to the employee sick pay proposal?
Why is it so difficult to understand that if employer costs go up, then number of employees will go down? In many businesses which are on the line right now, this pie in the sky idea could break them.
Municipalities and States can use the windfall profits to pay down their deficits, and private sector workers can derive some small satisfaction from recouping some benefit from the grossly over-compensated public sector.
An account manager or Executive assistant would equate to a GS-1, while management equates to GS-4 through 6.
Plug in your region and see for yourself!
The Repubs are using the top governmental positions to equate with minimum wage jobs....You have been lied to!
I think you are cherry-picking your information.
If somehow sick leave became a right, all that would happen is companies would begrudgingly give it, but they would require a doctors note from anyone who took a sick day. (some do already). Of course no doctor is free even with insurance, if you could even get a same day appointment anymore, so you'll be left with going to one of those quickie places staffed with nurses like patient first sitting in a waiting room for an hour and maybe more and paying $50 copay just to get that dr note and a prescription that will cost you another copay to fill
By the time you get home you feel like you worked an entire day anyway
Next time, you'll just take two aspirin and go to work.