Amy Traub
Sick People, Stay Home!
“Cover your cough,” advises the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in a brochure it has made available in fourteen languages. “Wash your hands,” it continues, and “stay home when you are sick.” In these anxious days of the swine flu outbreak, the City is promoting the brochure and its common sense advice more widely than ever. But for many working New Yorkers, staying home – no matter how serious the illness – is scarcely an option. They simply can’t afford it.
Without paid sick days, workers who need to take care of themselves when ill risk missing a day’s pay or even losing their jobs. To make matters worse, those without paid leave are often low-income workers, the people for whom missing a day’s pay may mean being unable to make rent or pay the electric bill that month. More than two-thirds of the city’s working poor are without a single paid sick day, according to the Community Service Society “Unheard Third” survey.
The result? Workers who can’t afford time off to recuperate spread contagious disease – not yet swine flu as far as we know, but a wide range of more garden-variety illnesses – in the city’s subways and buses, infect coworkers, risk making their own health worse and put clients and customers in danger. Some cities have figured out a better way.
In 2006, San Francisco voters chose to make their city the first in the country to guarantee paid sick days to every public and private sector employee in the city, including part-timers and temps. (Check out video of DMI’s Marketplace of Ideas event with San Francisco’s Sara Flocks and learn more about the event here. ) The law provides paid sick leave to approximately 116,000 San Francisco workers who previously lacked the benefit. Before the ordinance was passed, a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research projected that it would cost city employers $33.5 million each year in additional wages, payroll taxes, and administrative expenses, while also decreasing employee turnover, improving productivity and reducing the spread of disease, ultimately saving $46 million annually and producing a net gain. After the law was passed, researchers found that employment in San Francisco did not suffer after the implementation of the ordinance, and in fact the industry most affected by the new mandate (restaurant and hospitality businesses) saw strong job growth relative to other counties in the region.
The business groups that had initially opposed the ordinance in San Francisco admit that it has posed few problems for their members. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association called the law “successful” and acknowledged that employee abuse of the new benefit was not widespread. In 2008, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce admitted “we really have not heard much about it being a major issue for a lot of businesses.”
It’s no wonder that Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee have followed San Francisco’s example. Widespread anxiety over the swine flu is now prompting even more cities and states to consider the legislation. New York should join them, and while we’re at it, the nation as a whole should as well, by passing the Healthy Families Act, awaiting introduction in the current Congress.
Amy Traub: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 8:16 AM, May 05, 2009 in
Permalink | Email to Friend
