Should Paid Sick Days Be Mandatory?

Take my quiz! You’re out at a restaurant, and you get to choose:

A.    Being served by a waitress who’s feeling great.
B.    Being served by a waitress who was up all night with diarrhea but came to work anyway because she can’t afford to take unpaid sick leave.

If you’re like most people, choice A is a no-brainer. Sick people at work tend to spread illness to other people—maybe even to you.

But 46 million people in the United States don’t get paid sick days, which is about 46% of the private-industry labor force, according to the Associated Press. Those workers are most likely to be at small businesses, working at the low end of the pay scale.

There’s a movement afoot (and has been for some time) for legislation that would require businesses to offer mandatory paid sick days. About 12 states have proposed such legislation, including California, Connecticut, Minnesota, and West Virginia.

And in November, Ohio voters will decide whether to pass a proposal that would allow seven days of sick leave for people who work 30 or more hours a week at businesses with 25 or more employees.

But legislation like that is not an easy sell. Laws have failed because states either rejected proposals (Maine) or failed to act on them before legislative deadlines expired (Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and West Virginia). And in Ohio, a group that represents small businesses opposes the legislation because they say it could cost businesses with up to 99 employees $73,000 annually—a total of $1.17 billion over five years.

The argument for mandatory paid sick leave is often a humanitarian one. Frankly, who could read this story without thinking, “Give this lady a break!”

But the better argument might be this: Does it make sense to have sick school-bus drivers, hospital staff, grocery clerks, or anyone else for that matter? And adults with sick children often catch their children’s illnesses, so I’m no more likely to pick choice C: Being served by a waitress who was up all night with her sick kid but came to work anyway.

These initiatives are difficult to pass, but not impossible. Paid sick days are now mandatory in Washington, D.C.; and in San Francisco.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that you stay home if you have the flu. As for other illnesses, such as stomach flu and viral meningitis, the spread of those can be “prevented by allowing a sick worker to stay away from their workplace and by keeping sick children home from school,” according to 2007 Senate testimony by Rajiv Bhatia, MD, MPH, of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

If only people could.

(PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES)

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