Swine Flu and the Healthy Families Act

RantWoman has decided to farm out her space, with full attribution as follows:

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/sick-leave/
April 30, 2009, 9:00 pmNew York Times Blog
A Sick SituationJudith Warner
Early this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that anyone with flu symptoms stay home from work or school.
President Obama reiterated that advice at his press conference on Wednesday night. "If you are sick, stay home," he said. "If your child is sick, keep them out of school."
"I know it sounds trivial," the president said, after asking families to start taking other "very sensible precautions" like washing hands and covering up during coughs. "But it makes a huge difference."
The president's admonition to the sick to stay home didn't sound trivial to Silvia Del Valle, a 42-year-old restaurant worker in Miami.
It sounded impossible.
When I spoke to her Thursday morning, Del Valle was sick in bed with a cough and a fever. Was she planning to go to work, I asked her, Obama's press conference still fresh in my mind.
"Yes," she said. "I need to go. Because if I don't go, I lose my job."
Del Valle's not alone. Nearly half of all private sector workers in our country - more than 59 million people - have no paid sick time at all. The problem is particularly acute among women, low-wage workers - more than three-quarters of whom have no paid sick days - and part-timers.
Food service employees are the least likely to have access to sick leave. According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, only 14 percent of the people serving and handling food in restaurants can stay home from work when they're coughing and sneezing, without fear of losing their jobs. José Oliva, the policy coordinator for the advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, told me that among the food service employees he normally counsels - many of whom, like Del Valle, speak poor English and earn well below the minimum wage for tipped employees - only about one percent can stay home sick without the fear of losing pay or even their jobs. Del Valle has been working in Miami-area restaurants for seven years. She currently works nine hours a night for a flat fee of $30, and sends much of those earnings home to her parents and teenage daughter in Argentina.
Had she ever had the right to a paid sick day, I asked her.
"Not in this country," she said.
Had she ever had any benefits?
"Never in this country," she answered.
"Never in this country" is the sort of phrase that ought, in our country, to be paired with concepts like "unaffordable health care" or "lack of maternity leave" or "lack of ability to stay home in case of pandemic." Instead, thanks to business groups, it has long applied to any workplace policy that could bring substantial quality of life improvements - including basic job security - to American families.
Not only do a strong majority of people who work outside of government, white collar and union jobs now lack the right to take care of themselves and protect their coworkers when they fall ill, a whopping 70 percent of all workers lack paid time off to care for a sick child. This means that the school closings that are now multiplying as swine flu spreads run the risk of bringing financial catastrophe to many families. Eighty thousand students in the Fort Worth school system started staying home this week and may be out of school until at least May 8th. Schools in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin and California are closing, too.
The Forth Worth school superintendent asked employers to be flexible with employees who need to stay home with their kids. But with so many jobs lost, and so many now on the line, how far do families want to go in testing their employers' flexibility?
For single-parent homes, or for families that depend on two incomes, "This could be the beginning of a spiral into economic disaster," says Debra L. Ness, the president of the National Partnership for Women and Families. "People can't just cavalierly put their jobs or paychecks at risk."
There has never been any genuine financial justification for denying workers some number of paid sick days; productivity studies have long shown that paid leave policies are good for businesses. The opposition is only based on knee-jerk free-market social Darwinism - the kind of thinking that's driven social policy in our country for the better part of 30 years, and helped pitch us right into our current economic abyss.
Our workplace policies have long been unsuited for our times. "We operate as though there's a caregiver at home. It's as though we were stuck back in time," Ness said. And they've never looked more anachronistic than today, with more and more families forced to live on one income, and a possible pandemic in the making.
The Healthy Families Act, which would grant most workers seven paid sick days a year to care for themselves or sick family members, is soon to be re-introduced in Congress. I think it's fair to say that it's an idea whose time has come.
President Obama has repeatedly said we need to remember that crises offer opportunity. If the swine flu outbreak forces lawmakers, at long last, to give workers and families some of the protections that they need, perhaps this crisis will, on some level, turn out to have a silver lining, too.
* Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company