The amount of sick leave New York workers can accumulate under the law is modest: one hour of leave for every 30 hours worked, up to a maximum of 40 leave hours a year. That’s about five working days. And if their boss has fewer than five employees, the time can remain unpaid. Still, this is a very big deal, for both low-wage workers and their white-collar brethren like me — that is, professionals who have probably taken paid sick time for granted for most of our careers.
Maybe we don’t show much interest in the lives of the working poor, but we do presumably care about our immune systems. And thanks to this new law, we can finally rest assured that the baristas who serve us our morning lattes, the day-care aides who change our babies’ diapers, the nurses who draw our blood at our physicals, the eatery workers who slather mayo on our turkey subs and the custodians who invisibly clean our office bathrooms can all go home if they’re sick — rather than sticking around and sneezing and coughing all over our food, bodies, kids and workspaces.
This implicit guarantee doesn’t exist in most of the country. Only about a quarter of food workers nationwide have paid sick leave, according to an analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. So it’s perhaps not surprising that multiple surveys have found that more than half of food services workers say they’ve come to work sick. Read some of the many horrifying anecdotes collected about waiters, cooks, busboys and other food handlers coming in with norovirus, hepatitis A, pinkeye and other contagious illnesses, and you’ll never again want to eat a restaurant meal without first dousing it in Purell.
As you can imagine, most employees who arrive at work after puking their guts out don’t do so cheerily. They knowingly put others’ health at risk for two key reasons. One is that they can’t afford to miss a shift. The other is that they fear getting fired for the great sin of missing work because of illness. And in most of the country, businesses can fire workers for missing work, regardless of the reason.
Employers, after all, don’t see much of the upside of providing sick leave, since they don’t bear the full costs imposed by making workers perform their duties while ill. Unlike with an E. coli outbreak, for the most part customers who contract the flu from an ailing sandwich maker probably won’t be able to trace the bug back to the establishment where they caught it.
As with so many facets of our economy, when it comes to time off, we are partitioning into two nations: There is the United States where it’s OK to be sick on occasion and still hold on to your job; and the United States where, come hell or high water or food poisoning, you’re still expected in tomorrow at 7 a.m. sharp.
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