The coronavirus pandemic has exposed differences in how society values and treats workers and has led to a few temporary measures to modify the inequities baked into the system.
Many relatively low-wage workers were deemed essential and have had to continue showing up at work during the COVID-19 outbreak.
As states have moved to reopen, however, benefits like hazard pay for grocery store workers are already being rolled back.
So what about paid sick leave? Will a recent awareness brought on by the global pandemic that there are still workers in the United States who don’t have paid sick leave lead to change? Some states, Michigan included, now have some sick leave rules in place, but many people are left out.
Opponents of requiring employers to offer paid sick leave decry the cost and fret that it hurts employment because employers will make other kinds of cuts to offset the cost of paying for medical leave.
But during a public health crisis involving a contagious disease, the benefits of encouraging people to stay home when they’re sick appear obvious.
Still, isn’t it always a good idea to encourage people to stay home when they’re sick? Do you really want the cook or server at your favorite restaurant to come in for his shift when he’s sneezing and feeling cruddy even if it’s “just a cold?”
Christina Hayes, 32, of Inkster struggled for a long time to reconcile a lack of paid sick leave at her call center job for a large cable company and her lupus diagnosis, which required chemotherapy infusions and blood draws. She’s in remission now but dealt with a range of issues, including extreme body aches and high blood pressure, at a time when she did not have paid sick leave.
Hayes, who has a more flexible arrangement now working as a ramp operator for an airline, did have vacation days in her old job, but she did not have much leeway in scheduling for her necessary medical appointments, which she sometimes missed. After passing out at work at one point, she decided she needed to leave her job.
“Sickness or needing time to get better is a universal thing. It doesn’t just affect one person,” she said. “It’s sad that it takes a pandemic. No one should ever have to make that choice between their job and taking care of their health.”
Many workers in the United States did gain paid sick leave for COVID-19 issues as part of the federal government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, but that benefit, for employers with fewer than 500 employees, goes only through December. The paid leave, up to 80 hours, covers not just those who are being treated for COVID-19 symptoms, but also those whose child care is out the window because of the virus. Employers are to be reimbursed through tax credits.
“The law enables employers to keep their workers on their payrolls, while at the same time ensuring that workers are not forced to choose between their paychecks and the public health measures needed to combat the virus,” according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Aside from COVID-19 efforts, some form of paid leave is now the law in a number of states, including Michigan. Michigan’s law, which saw the Legislature rework — or gut, as activists charge — a more generous petition-driven effort in 2018, mandates paid medical leave at employers with 50 or more individuals, up to 40 hours based on what they accrue, with a number of exemptions.
Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan, described the current leave protections as a patchwork state-level approach to paid leave combined with an emergency federal measure addressing the pandemic.
He doesn’t believe across-the-board change is likely to come from companies, but it could come from Congress, especially in an election year of rising anger when many people are out work.
Congress could also choose to modify what it has already passed, such as by eliminating the 500-employee limit for paid leave.
Danielle Atkinson, executive director of Mothering Justice, a local group that advocates for causes such as paid leave, said the awareness of the issue has been heightened by the pandemic, but it’s not clear a permanent change is on the horizon.
“I’m happy and encouraged by the enthusiasm that more people are putting behind this issue. I think we are recognizing as a country, and elected officials are recognizing, the importance of the ability to stay home when you’re sick or to take care of a loved one. It’s in everyone’s faces right now. So that gives me hope (but) the way that our Congress operates and the dysfunction in D.C. does not give me hope for us talking about this issue past the current health crisis,” Atkinson said.
She called the temporary federal measure related to COVID-19, which does not apply to the largest employers, “a reaction to multimillion dollar corporations saying to their friends, ‘make sure that I’m exempt.’ ”
Atkinson said the issue affects many people even when they don’t realize it. You might have sick leave protections that allow you to stay home with a sick child, but if the other parents at your school do not, then they might send a sick child to school because they’re not allowed to stay home, which puts your family in jeopardy.
“Everybody gets sick, but not everybody has time to get well,” she said.
Marick Masters, a Wayne State University business professor, has his doubts that the current moment will have significant lasting impact on things like sick leave.
“People’s memories are short,” Masters said. “In … that time period during the Spanish flu, 50 million people in the world died, 675,000 in the United States died, and we had just a fraction of our population back then. And you know, I don’t remember my grandparents ever talking about the Spanish flu.”
Masters noted that economic realities, with the current extraordinary level of unemployment, will affect how individual businesses react. Cost calculations will come into play, he said.
“I think the harsh reality, unfortunately, is that lots of business are going to be very hard hit by this, and they’re not going to be able to bring everybody back,” he said.
Sick leave benefits are also not distributed evenly. Workers who make less money, many of those in the types of service jobs that put them in close contact with the public, are more likely not to have the benefits.
A 2017 paper from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute noted that, at that time, “87 percent of private-sector workers in the top 10 percent of wages have the ability to earn paid sick days, compared with only 27 percent of private-sector workers in the bottom 10 percent.”
The paper said the impact on the business climate in places where sick leave was the rule was actually positive. It also offered a bit of food for thought, that “almost half of all restaurant-related foodborne illness outbreaks are attributed to employees coming to work while ill.”
Kelly Garrett has long advocated for paid leave and worries about the choices work and illness in the age of coronavirus might present for her adult son, who has sickle cell anemia. Garrett is the mayor of Lathrup Village and is running for Oakland County commissioner.
The illness, she said, would sometimes make it hard for her son to breathe when he was growing up. Sometimes he’d have to be hospitalized when he'd run a fever. It was often scary.
Garrett has worked at jobs where she had paid sick leave and at others where she did not. She recalled trying to work while her son was in the hospital in a medically induced coma at one point, and at another time, being asked to work while her son was being prepped for surgery.
One of the troubling memories she has, however, was connected less to her own son than what she saw at a hospital when he was 2 years old. Other children were being moved into a hallway. It was happening because those children were alone, presumably because their parents could not be with them as a result of work. It’s hard for Garrett, who has been active with Mothering Justice, to imagine what parents would go through, not being with their children in the hospital. She said it was always a given that she would be with her own son when he was hospitalized.
“I could never imagine my young child having to navigate a hospital setting by himself,” she said.
Garrett said the current federal COVID-19 paid leave legislation should continue beyond December, in part, because she believes the virus is not done with us.
“I can only hope that they extend it. That was round one. We should be ready for round two,” she said.
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @_ericdlawrence.
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