The Los Angeles Times is out today with a story on workers punished for little more than getting the flu — and the national movement to make paid sick days a basic workplace standard:
Glynndana Shevlin awoke Oct. 30 with a runny nose and scratchy throat, worried she might have the flu. But the full-time food and beverage concierge at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim has no paid sick days, and if her absences stack up, she faces discipline.
So like many others in the service industry, Shevlin, 49, weighed her options and reported to work sick.
“I thought I could make it,” said Shevlin, who has worked at the hotel for 21 years.
Four hours into her shift — and after several trips to the bathroom to retch — Shevlin asked to leave early. She lost wages and was docked disciplinary points.
“I felt like I was being punished for doing the right thing,” she said.
Though President Obama has declared H1N1 flu a national emergency and federal health and labor officials have urged sick workers to stay home, for many that’s not an option. A third of the nation’s workers don’t have paid sick days — about 51 million people, according to U.S. Department of Laborestimates last spring. That percentage rises to about 40% in California, according to a study last year.
The figure is even higher in the service sector-heavy economy of New York City, where a disturbing new report from the Community Service Society and A Better Balance estimates that nearly half (48%) of the workforce has no paid sick leave whatsoever.
As momentum builds toward this Tuesday’s City Council hearing on a WFP-backed bill to make paid sick days a citywide workplace standard, progressives got another piece of good news when the White House announced its support for federal paid sick days legislation:
In testifying before the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee’s Subcommittee on Children and Families, Deputy Labor Secretary Seth Harris, said,
The Healthy Families Act offers an important opportunity to provide workers with economic security by assuring that they have the ability to stay home if they are sick without fear of losing their jobs or being forced to go to work sick because they cannot afford to stay home.
