Daily News (Albor Ruiz Column): New York workers deserve paid sick leave
For more than 1 million New York workers, even in this day and age, getting sick is an unaffordable luxury. Not only because most of these workers lack health insurance – a fate shared with 47 million other people in the country – but because they don’t receive a single paid sick day where they work. Take the case of Guillermo Barrero, a 36-year-old Mexican immigrant and father of two. After working as a cook – listen to this – seven days a week for seven years at the same Brooklyn coffee shop, he became sick at work on Sept. 18 and had to be rushed to the hospital by his wife. His boss, “la señora,” as he calls her, became so angry that she summarily fired him.
NY Times (Jim Dwyer Column): Health Care? Not if You Can’t Leave Work to Get It
Adela Valdez made lamps in a factory at the back of a lighting store on Canal Street in Manhattan. The job paid minimum wage and no benefits. Last month, she got sick but went to work. On her third day of coughing and feeling generally crummy, she was feverish. “I asked the boss for permission to go to the hospital,” said Ms. Valdez, 39, a mother of four. “She said, ‘It’s fine, go — but you don’t have a job anymore.’ ” …To questions of cost and coverage, add one more detail to the national debate about health care: time. In New York, time may be more important than cost. The city’s empire of public hospitals finds ways to serve hundreds of thousands of people who don’t have enough money or lack private insurance. But people who have no health insurance through their jobs are not likely to have paid sick days, either. By some estimates, 765,000 workers in the city do not get paid when they stay home sick.
