As the coronavirus pandemic has spread across the U.S., many of us
have heard a consistent message from policymakers and employers.
Stay home if you're sick.
But for millions of Americans, staying home from work when you're
sick isn't an option.
One out of every four workers in the U.S., that's more than 33
million people, don't have access to paid sick leave.
There's no federally-mandated paid sick leave in the United States.
There's not even federally mandated sick leave in the United States.
Jackeline Bonett, a cleaner in Miami, says she had to forego her
salary for 15 days as she stayed home in quarantine.
Sandra Rivera Del Valle says she gave up two weeks pay to
self-isolate, then was laid off.
An emergency relief law that went into effect in April expanded paid
sick leave benefits for workers coping with coronavirus-related
issues. Yet many Americans are still falling through the cracks.
Particularly these essential workers will go into work.
Some of them may be going to work not feeling their best because they
have to get a check.
Some caution now is not the time to enact a permanent sick leave
mandate as employers suffer from an unparalleled economic downturn.
Employers are going to be struggling to get back to work.
And the last thing we need to do is make employees more expensive.
Some states and municipalities have enacted their own sick pay
policies in recent years.
But why isn't there a federal requirement for paid sick leave in the
U.S.? And could the coronavirus pandemic lead to a permanent change
in policy?
Paid sick leave allows workers to stay home when they're sick and to
keep getting a paycheck during that time.
They have an opportunity to take care of their own medical needs or
the needs of somebody, a dependent, a child, a partner,
and not have to worry about not getting paid.
Most advanced economies have laws requiring employers to provide this
benefit. In countries in Europe, for example, workers can take up to
six months off paid for a long-term illness.
Companies in China also offer paid sick leave for six months or more.
In the U.S. It's another story.
We are alone among every other
advanced economy in not having either paid
sick leave or paid family and medical leave.
Robert Reich was labor secretary under President Bill Clinton.
He helped implement the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993, which
provided job protection to workers to take unpaid time off for family
and medical related reasons.
We got the Family Medical Leave Act, f
inally, after seven long years of trying to organize and
mobilize and lobby for that.
The law faced opposition from groups like the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce who argued against federal mandates on business.
President George H.W.
Bush had vetoed a similar bill twice.
Part of the problem, quite frankly, was the big companies just did
not want anything like it.
Well, you can imagine if it's unpaid family and medical leave, that
the idea of any sort of paid sick leave is not going to go down
well with the powers that be.
It's very easy to say, oh, gosh, paid sick leave is a wonderful
benefit. Everybody should have it.
I don't disagree. It's a wonderful benefit and we would like if
everybody had it. But is the answer telling every
employer thou shalt provide it?
Or is the answer some other approach that recognizes that every
employer is in a position to do this?
The cost of providing sick leave for employers averaged forty-two
cents per employee per hour worked as of March 2019.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you can break it down to
these very small incremental costs.
But those accumulate, particularly in the small
business environment where cash flow is so restricted.
Roughly 40 percent of employers in the U.S.
also offer short-term disability insurance.
This allows workers to apply to continue to receive a portion of
their salary for up to six months if they suffer from an injury or
illness. Small businesses are least likely to offer paid sick leave
in the U.S. Roughly one third of workers at companies with fewer than
50 employees don't have paid sick time.
Bigger companies are more likely to offer the benefit, though cost is
still a factor. If one big company doesn't, then it
becomes competitively difficult for any other big company to provide
it. But that is obviously going to be more
costly and put the company that provides it at a competitive
disadvantage. As a coronavirus pandemic has spread many Americans
have faced an impossible predicament: choosing between their health
and their income. We spoke with Sandra Rivera Del Valle, a
fifty-seven-year-old cancer survivor who cleaned plane cabins at
Orlando International Airport.
Sandra's doctor told her to self quarantine when she started to feel
sick. She had no health care or paid sick leave during that time.
When she came back to work, she was laid off.
And now she doesn't know how to pay the bills.
Lack of paid sick time especially hurts poorer Americans.
Less than one third of workers who make under ten dollars and 80
cents an hour, or those in the lowest income bracket, are guaranteed
paid sick days, while almost all high income workers are covered,
according to 2019 government data.
Jackeline makes eight dollars and fifty six cents an hour cleaning
office spaces in Miami.
When she was exposed to someone with coronavirus-like symptoms, she
stayed home unpaid to protect her health and her families.
Now she says she's struggling to make ends meet.
Around 40 percent of workers like Jackeline and Sandra in the services
industry in the U.S.
do not have access to paid sick leave.
Many service industry workers are now considered essential during the
coronavirus pandemic.
Public health experts say these workers aren't only risking their own
health. They're putting others at risk, too.
You can imagine somebody coughing and just spreading the illness
to anybody else was spreading the virus to somebody else.
Congress has taken some steps to try to expand paid sick leave amid
the coronavirus pandemic.
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which went into effect
April 1st, provides up to two weeks pay for workers dealing with C
ovid-19 issues, like the need to quarantine.
To put families first our legislation secures paid leave with
two weeks of paid sick leave and family and medical leave for those
affected by the virus.
The policy expires at the end of the year, a provision that helped to
get the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on board.
The business lobby had sent a letter to Congress in March urging
lawmakers not to create a federal one-size-fits-all permanent sick
leave mandate. We did support the temporary leave
provisions because we thought it was temporary.
That was necessary for getting employees out of the workplace that
had to be out of workplace.
December 31, 2020 will come.
These benefits will end and something else will happen.
Paid sick leave shouldn't just be something we talk about when
there's a pandemic in this country.
Millions of American workers are also excluded from the new law.
The Labor Department issued a rule saying some small businesses with
fewer than 50 employees may seek exemptions from the paid leave
requirement. Companies with more than 500 employees are also exempt.
In total, around 75 percent of Americans work for companies that
qualify for exemptions from the law.
If you are an hourly worker or if you're a contract worker,
or if you are the vast majority of Americans
working for either big companies and certainly small companies,
you're not going to get anything.
In the absence of a federal requirement, 13 states and the District of
Columbia have passed their own laws in recent years requiring
employers to guarantee paid sick leave.
Catherine Maclean co-authored a recent study examining the cost of
these state mandates.
What we did is we looked at states before and after those
policies, and we compared them to other states that did not adopt a
policy. One of the study's findings was that employees did not use
all of the sick days they were allotted.
We are not seeing what we would view as
excessive use of the benefit.
We see two additional days.
Most of these mandates provide up to seven.
Other researcher has found paid sick time increases worker
productivity. Somebody is coming to work with their full self.
They're feeling 100 percent.
They're not coming to work and not feeling well.
So even though the costs may, it may be expensive in the
long run, it helps the bottom line in terms of
productivity. The question now is whether the coronavirus
pandemic might build momentum toward a permanent federal law
mandating paid sick leave.
If there is a silver lining, it would be that we become more
sensitive to the fact that we need paid sick leave.
Others say now's not the time for a longer term change in policy.
We don't believe that trying to develop a broad new
policy in the context of a crisis is a good idea.
Some businesses argue they won't be able to afford additional benefits
as they try to rebound from the unprecedented economic downturn.
We aren't looking at the robust economy we had two months ago, which
even in that environment, let's be clear, there were questions and
concerns about how to do this and whether that should be done.
For workers like Jackeline, a longer term solution on sick pay would
provide both peace of mind and financial relief.