There is no doubt at all the American sick leave system is a scandal. This nearly always affects hourly workers in the private sector. That is because they are hourly, not salaried. They are paid for the time they work, not for the work they do like salaried individuals, who also have more discretion and control at their jobs. Salaried people, typically managers in the private sector, can do whatever the hell they want and they get paid regardless. Being salaried is always better than being hourly paid, no chance of overtime notwithstanding and being paid while sick is an added bonus. I have done both, and salaried is better.
But there is a catch: It does not cover everyone. And the loopholes became even larger after the House made major changes to the bill on Monday night.
The big picture: Who is covered? Small and midsize companies are required to provide these benefits for workers impacted by the coronavirus, but Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia can exempt businesses with fewer than 50 employees and health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes. Gig workers and people who are self-employed also get these benefits in the form of a tax credit.
Of course the GOP has to screw over workers. Asshole employers often think that their lowly employees will "abuse" sick leave. Never mind supervisors and managers are the worst at abusing it.
The Los Angeles Times editorialized about the nation's scandalous sick leave policies, which are nonexistent in numerous companies, especially those that are in "service sector" jobs:
“We’ve been living off the formation of low-wage and low-hour jobs in sectors that happen to be incredibly vulnerable to just this particular crisis,” says Daniel Alpert, an investment banker and adjunct professor at Cornell Law School who helped develop the Job Quality Index, which tracks the relative rise of private sector jobs paying less than the average weekly income of all American production and nonsupervisory jobs.
“In the current situation, where you have a dead stop in consumer activity, any ‘customer-facing’ business where the customer is no longer doing any ‘facing’ is under enormous threat,” Alpert told me.
The increase in consumer service jobs that Alpert and his colleagues track is the mirror image of the decline in manufacturing employment; his figures show that employment in restaurants and bars began to exceed that in manufacturing in late 2009, and never looked back. In 1990, the 12.7 million manufacturing jobs accounted for 17.3% of all rank-and-file workers. Today they’re down to 9 million jobs and 8.5% of the rank-and-file workforce.
We have Ronald Reagan and the neolibs to thank for the gutting of the manufacturing base. I could go on and rant about so many jobs being exported to places like China, which was Ground Zero for this coronavirus shit and leaving this country vulnerable in a myriad of ways.
Additionally, women dominated these "service jobs" which were created as supplemental jobs to the REAL jobs men did, and therefore their jobs are paid shit with few or no benefits. They were not meant to be jobs people could support themselves on, but instead they were meant as "pin money" jobs.
And don't get me started on the lack of eligibility for unemployment benefits for education personnel, especially classified, who are NOT paid a salary unlike certified workers. The lack of it is also based on the notion that since women do those jobs, they are being supported by men. They don't need UI, unlike the men who are in seasonal jobs like construction, logging, and fishing but like classified personnel in education, they are called back to work.
Fuck this shit. ALL of it.
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