Our Terrible Sick Leave System

Millions of people do not have paid sick leave, so when or if we have a pandemic like the coronavirus, we will have lots of vectors running around spreading disease.  That's because so many employers are nothing more than assholes, thinking the low-paid people not on salary are going to "abuse" sick leave, and therefore they don't provide it at all

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It's a goddamned scandal.

During most of my working life I was covered by sick leave of one type or another, but when I worked for Baker & Taylor in Reno for nearly a dozen years from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the management there was of the belief their poorly paid workers were trying to pull something if they did have sick leave.  We had something like "PTO" after years of not having any kind of sick leave at all.  It was better than nothing, but it wasn't very good.

In education, we don't have vacation pay, of course, but the sick leave tends to be generous as people in this field get sick more often thanks to parents not keeping their kids home when they are ill.  However, school districts can be the shits, too, when they violate FMLA, as I know from bitter experience dealing with WCSD.

Of course management gets all kinds of goodies like sick leave because they are SALARIED.  They are paid for the "work" they do, not the time they do it, unlike most workers.

Get a load of these stats from the article:

There is no federal law guaranteeing paid time off for illness, and paid sick leave is comparatively rare for lower-wage workers. Just 63 percent of people working in service occupations have paid sick leave, versus more than 90 percent of people in management positions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For people working part-time, just 43 percent can get sick leave from their employer.

And for people working those lower-wage jobs, it’s not easy for them to skip work if they’re not getting paid, even if they’re feeling flu-like symptoms that could be either the flu itself or the coronavirus.

All the public health warnings in the world can’t always stand up against the need to bring home a paycheck. Just 27 percent of people whose wages fall in the bottom 10 percent are able to earn paid sick leave from their job, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Any less pay eats into their basic needs: As EPI put it, the lost wages from missing three days of work can equal a month’s worth of groceries or their monthly utility bills.