[After all the slightly hysterical attempts to use pandemics as a hook for political activism, this one seems actually pretty sound. A pandemic certainly might happen someday, and whadayano, it's yet another thing where a decent welfare state is the sine non qua.]
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/sick-leave/
April 30, 2009, 9:00 pm New York Times Blog
A Sick Situation Judith Warner
Early this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
recommended that anyone with flu symptoms stay home from work or
school.
President Obama reiterated that advice at his press conference on
Wednesday night. "If you are sick, stay home," he said. "If your
child is sick, keep them out of school."
"I know it sounds trivial," the president said, after asking
families to start taking other "very sensible precautions" like
washing hands and covering up during coughs. "But it makes a huge
difference."
The president's admonition to the sick to stay home didn't sound
trivial to Silvia Del Valle, a 42-year-old restaurant worker in
Miami.
It sounded impossible.
When I spoke to her Thursday morning, Del Valle was sick in bed with
a cough and a fever. Was she planning to go to work, I asked her,
Obama's press conference still fresh in my mind.
"Yes," she said. "I need to go. Because if I don't go, I lose my
job."
Del Valle's not alone. Nearly half of all private sector workers in
our country - more than 59 million people - have no paid sick time
at all. The problem is particularly acute among women, low-wage
workers - more than three-quarters of whom have no paid sick days -
and part-timers.
Food service employees are the least likely to have access to sick
leave. According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, only
14 percent of the people serving and handling food in restaurants
can stay home from work when they're coughing and sneezing, without
fear of losing their jobs. José Oliva, the policy coordinator for
the advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, told me
that among the food service employees he normally counsels - many of
whom, like Del Valle, speak poor English and earn well below the
minimum wage for tipped employees - only about one percent can stay
home sick without the fear of losing pay or even their jobs.
Del Valle has been working in Miami-area restaurants for seven
years. She currently works nine hours a night for a flat fee of $30,
and sends much of those earnings home to her parents and teenage
daughter in Argentina.
Had she ever had the right to a paid sick day, I asked her.
"Not in this country," she said.
Had she ever had any benefits?
"Never in this country," she answered.
"Never in this country" is the sort of phrase that ought, in our
country, to be paired with concepts like "unaffordable health care"
or "lack of maternity leave" or "lack of ability to stay home in
case of pandemic." Instead, thanks to business groups, it has long
applied to any workplace policy that could bring substantial quality
of life improvements - including basic job security - to American
families.
Not only do a strong majority of people who work outside of
government, white collar and union jobs now lack the right to take
care of themselves and protect their coworkers when they fall ill, a
whopping 70 percent of all workers lack paid time off to care for a
sick child. This means that the school closings that are now
multiplying as swine flu spreads run the risk of bringing financial
catastrophe to many families. Eighty thousand students in the Fort
Worth school system started staying home this week and may be out of
school until at least May 8th. Schools in New York, Illinois,
Wisconsin and California are closing, too.
The Forth Worth school superintendent asked employers to be flexible
with employees who need to stay home with their kids. But with so
many jobs lost, and so many now on the line, how far do families
want to go in testing their employers' flexibility?
For single-parent homes, or for families that depend on two incomes,
"This could be the beginning of a spiral into economic disaster,"
says Debra L. Ness, the president of the National Partnership for
Women and Families. "People can't just cavalierly put their jobs or
paychecks at risk."
There has never been any genuine financial justification for denying
workers some number of paid sick days; productivity studies have
long shown that paid leave policies are good for businesses. The
opposition is only based on knee-jerk free-market social Darwinism -
the kind of thinking that's driven social policy in our country for
the better part of 30 years, and helped pitch us right into our
current economic abyss.
Our workplace policies have long been unsuited for our times. "We
operate as though there's a caregiver at home. It's as though we
were stuck back in time," Ness said. And they've never looked more
anachronistic than today, with more and more families forced to live
on one income, and a possible pandemic in the making.
The Healthy Families Act, which would grant most workers seven paid
sick days a year to care for themselves or sick family members, is
soon to be re-introduced in Congress. I think it's fair to say that
it's an idea whose time has come.
President Obama has repeatedly said we need to remember that crises
offer opportunity. If the swine flu outbreak forces lawmakers, at
long last, to give workers and families some of the protections that
they need, perhaps this crisis will, on some level, turn out to have
a silver lining, too.
* Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company