Anyone who’s ever held down a job can tell you the value of paid sick days for an individual worker. But growing evidence suggests the ability to take the day off when you get sick also has real benefits for your co-workers and the broader economy.
A new study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research says last fall’s H1N1 epidemic may have been worsened by the millions of Americans who came to work sick and infected their coworkers.
As Nancy Folbre, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amhurst and New York Times Economix guest blogger, argues, the costs of implementing paid sick days policies could be mitigated by the economic damage they prevent:
New York Times Economix Blog
Sick at Work
By Nancy Folbre
Almost 18 million employees took at least part of a week off. The other eight million didn’t …they helped spread the virus. By not heeding strong advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stay home, employees infected with H1N1 are estimated to have infected as many as seven million co-workers.
Would paid sick leave have reduced this contagion? Probably. About 90 percent of public sector employees infected with H1N1 took time away from work – probably reflecting their access to paid sick leave. By contrast, only 66 percent of infected private sector employees, with much lower coverage, took time away from work.
When Senator Edward M. Kennedy introduced the Healthy Families Act last spring he said, “There’s something wrong when people have to choose between their jobs and taking care of themselves or their families when someone is sick.”
There’s also something wrong when many workers can’t afford to take official advice to stay home and minimize the risk of making other people sick.
H1N1 may be waning, but we can expect other costly epidemics down the road.
Read the full blog post: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/sick-at-work/#more-51557
