Sick Leave Is Smart Business

November 11, 2009
By Connie Schultz
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In a perfect world, no working American would get sick with the H1N1 virus.

Alas, perfection eludes us.

In a slightly less perfect world, workers in America who got the flu would not infect friends, colleagues and total strangers, because their bosses would recognize there’s a benefit to their businesses and the employees still standing when highly contagious workers are allowed to recover at home without losing a day’s pay. It’s called paid sick leave.

Yeah, well. That whole more-perfect-union thing looks great on parchment, but we have a ways to go before we reach that little patch of Colonial nirvana.

In the meantime, we’re stuck with modern-day America, which is so far from perfect that nearly half our workers have no paid sick leave. This makes their lives more stressful than they already are, which is really unfortunate because doctors keep warning us that we must reduce stress to improve our chances when battling the flu. Apparently, stress has a way of pummeling our immune system, which - how’s this for coincidence? - is exactly what we need to kick in big-time when we’re threatened by the flu virus. Bummer.

Public health experts also repeatedly warn us to stay home as soon as we think we might be getting sick. What a great idea - for about half of America.

“On the one hand, you have all of our top officials saying, ‘Do the responsible thing: If you’re sick, stay home,’” Debra Ness told CNNMoney.com. She’s president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, which is pushing for paid sick leave laws.

“You have advice from the Centers for Disease Control on exactly how many days you should stay home, and how many days we need to keep kids at home. And at the same time, we have a country where almost half of the work force doesn’t have a single paid sick day.”

When workers without paid sick leave start sounding as if they’re about to cough up a lung and are running fevers that could scramble an egg, their minds immediately “do the math,” as we love to say these days. They know that every lost day of pay lands a blow to an already battered family budget.

They also fear that calling in sick will trigger the tempers of the bosses, who usually do have health care but are still anemic when it comes to the amount of compassion coursing through their veins. In such instances, not showing up can expedite a worker’s sudden entry into the even bleaker world of the unemployed.

I come from a long line of Americans who were - and in some cases still are - underpaid and uninsured, so I know that such workers are often smarter than some of us want to believe. Many hourly wage earners survey the landscape with eyes trained to spot hidden craters and bottomless pits and quickly surmise they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by protecting others when they’re sick. So they show up for work anyway.

Talk about not caring about the people who don’t care about you.

Apparently, there’s some anecdotal evidence that the H1N1 virus is bringing out the worst in some of us long before our swoon. A co-worker sneezes or a cashier coughs and a growing number of us skip right over the God-bless-yous and gesundheits and go straight to, “What the hell are you doing at work?” And infecting us, we mean.

Cleveland Plain Dealer reporters Jim Nichols and Tom Feran wrote last week that this flu-inspired spurt in incivility may be a trend. As author P.M. Forni told them, we may be facing “a nationwide test of thoughtfulness” that not all of us will pass.

Forni, who wrote the best-selling book The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude, said we may see more “conflicts, hostility and rudeness,” which could escalate to physical blows as the flu season picks up momentum.

The good news is that more of us are starting to worry about our fellow Americans who can’t afford to get sick.

Too bad so many had to get sick before we cared.