Paid Sick Days
By BOB HERBERT
It sounds reasonable: seven paid sick days a year. Why should you have to lose a couple of days pay, or maybe even your job, because you had the misfortune to catch the flu?
And it certainly seems unreasonable to penalize an employee in good standing who misses a day or two of work to care for a child who is ill or has met with a serious accident.
After all, this is the 21st century.
The reality, for a surprising percentage of the U.S. population, is more like the 19th century. Nearly half of all full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None. If one of those workers woke up with excruciating pains in his or her chest and had to be rushed to a hospital — well, no pay for that day. For many of these workers, the cost of an illness could be the loss of their job. . .
Food service workers are among those least likely to get paid sick days. Eighty-six percent get no sick days at all. They show up in the restaurants coughing and sneezing and feverish, and they start preparing and serving meals. You won’t see many of them wearing masks. . .
“At least 145 countries have paid sick days,” said Ms. Leff. “The United States is the only industrialized country lacking such a policy. Our goal is to change that.”
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