Scientific Reason Why You Should Claim Paid Sick Days
Corporate America doesn’t know what’s good for it — in this case, paid sick leave. The United States is one of three industrialized countries that does not require employers to provide paid sick leave, and employers often choose not to. As of 2011, only 65 percent of all workers in the United States had paid sick leave.
But over the past few years, states have passed their own sick leave laws. In cities and states that introduced compulsory paid sick leave, the incidence of influenza fell by an average of 5 percent, according to a 2017 study. During some waves of influenza, there were 40 percent fewer cases of the flu than in places without mandatory sick leave! This is a huge change, especially for the disease that killed 165 children last winter and hospitalized one in a thousand Americans!
According to the study, all of this was achieved without significant reductions in wages or employment. But employers, who honestly may not care if a country becomes 40 percent smaller than a country infected with the flu, may complain that employees dare to abuse some sick leave. If we give them a sick break, they can just take a pleasant day off from time to time!
First, these employers can suck a lemon. If they don’t care about us, we don’t need to take care of them. Second, one of the authors of the aforementioned study examined this when Germany lowered its mandatory sickness benefit from 100 percent to 80 percent in 1996. This did reduce “unearned” sick days, but ultimately led to such an increase in actual sick days that it leveled off.
It is bad news! What happened was that more sick people stayed at work to avoid a 20 percent cut in wages and, in turn, more of their colleagues got sick. This led to the fact that the number of sick days increased so much that everything evened out. So now the same number of people are going home, but more of them are really sick. German employers saved money by making people sick – not just their employees, but everyone else who got sick. Economically, they got away with imposing external costs on the public.
Paid sick leave makes people less sick at no cost to employees and only minimal cost to employers. So if you are one of the 35 percent of American workers without paid sick leave, then you are fighting for a city or state mandate. Visit the Open States website for the telephone number of your state legislator. When you get sick, you deserve to go home, and your employer shouldn’t punish you for it.
And if you have paid sick leave, go home when you get sick . Being a workaholic doesn’t make you any less contagious – working from home. Help create a culture in which sick days are the norm and even encouraged. Because in most companies, your boss is not going to start this trend.