America’s Employer-Friendly Labor Market Conditions Imperil Public Health
The Centers for Disease Control sensibly suggests that in these times of swine flu, if you get sick you should stay home rather than spread the disease to your coworkers:
Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people. If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
Which is nice for those people whose employers provide them with paid sick days. But as Pat Garofalo points out not that many people have employers who provide them with paid sick days:
Currently, nearly 50 percent of private-sector workers have no paid sick days. For low-income workers, the number jumps to 76 percent, and climbs to 86 percent for food service workers. These workers have to decide between the health of themselves and their co-workers, and the wages that they lose by staying home.
In other words, on any given day a large proportion of sick food service workers are going to find themselves unable to afford to take the day off, endangering the health of everyone else. This bill from Ted Kennedy and Rosa DeLauro would “guarantee workers up to seven paid sick days a year to recover from an illness or care for a sick family member.”
76 Responses to “America’s Employer-Friendly Labor Market Conditions Imperil Public Health”
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April 27th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I’d love for some libertarian bloggers to talk about the efficient market level of deaths in a pandemic. Maybe someone at Reason? Maybe Julian Sanchez could write it on spec. Or if Tyler Cowen does it, he could combine the issues into the post with DC/VA local eateries with authentic spices and low virus levels.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Is an epidemic at the workplace really employer-friendly? It’s employee-hostile, certainly, but it sure looks penny-wise and pound-foolish on the employers’ part. Maybe a little government paternalism would protect employers from their own tendencies to squeeze their employees until productivity drops.
Then again, maybe they gain more from not paying employees with noncommunicable sicknesses than they lose from workplace epidemics. Someone should do a study. (Don’t forget the cost of sickness-induced errors by sick-and-present workers!)
But the food service workers, in particular, come into contact with a lot of the public (other service sectors too – retail clerks are mostly in that low-income category, for example), which means this is a public health issue as well as an economic productivity issue.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
i wonder what is homeland security take on this , that is if they are keeping theireyes on the ball
April 27th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Here in Colorado, we go to work sick. We need to save our sick days for when there’s 18 inches of fresh powder in Vail.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
1) 7 paid sick days is nice, but it’s not very many, really. I mean, I think I’ve stayed home sick 2 or 3 days in the last few years, and I have sick days, but if you’re really sick, it’s likely not enough.
2) At many jobs, not only do you have to worry about not getting paid if you’re stay out when you’re sick, you also have to worry about being fired or otherwise having your working life made much worse. To some degree this is so even of high-paying jobs that have sick days. There’s no sense in denying that people can abuse them, especially in “use them or lose them” systems, but in many jobs you’re pushed very hard to come to work, sick or not, whether you have sick days or not. It’s generally crappy.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
“These workers have to decide between the health of themselves and their co-workers, and the wages that they lose by staying home.”
No. They have to decide between having a job and being fired. If their employer is in a good mood they can stay home without pay. But too many missed days and they’re gone.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Thank you for posting this. The reasons as to why this is swine flu scare is such a national health concern are obvious when you look at the workers’ hierarchy. Then, the fact that the economic market is getting some large hits is all the more worrisome when people are struggling to keep jobs/make enough to get by. This is particularly true for those in the “swine” business right now, but stocks are falling all around. I watched an interesting video on all of this at newsy.com. The video highlights a few different issues and perspectives, and is worth looking at:
http://www.newsy.com/videos/the_world_on_swine_flu_alert/
April 27th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
This seems like a no-brainer. I’m not a fan of required vacation, but everyone should be able to stay home a few days a year if they’re ill.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
fostert hit the nail on the head – there will always be resistance to mandatory sick days because they are (somewhat rightfully) seen as equivalent to vacation days. Who would give up 7 days’ paid vacation each year just because they didn’t get sick?
April 27th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
This would be a good time to stop the perfect attendance awards in schools, and to remind people that getting enough sleep is an important part of keeping the immune system healthy.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
there will always be resistance to mandatory sick days because they are (somewhat rightfully) seen as equivalent to vacation days. Who would give up 7 days’ paid vacation each year just because they didn’t get sick?
God forbid we mandate 7 paid days off a year for the lying sacks of shit workers. I for one don’t want to live in a islamofascist-communist Eurostan.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
I think I would rather live in a world that was made wealthy by free markets and thus employers offer sick days to retain employees rather than a socialist state that sets every possible regulation on employers and removes any level of benefit competition among employers.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I think I would rather live in a world that was made wealthy by free markets and thus employers offer sick days to retain employees rather than a socialist state that sets every possible regulation on employers and removes any level of benefit competition among employers.
I think I’d rather live in a world with billions of rainbows everywhere and pots of gold for everyone.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Everyone taking off sick at one time would be pretty burdensome for employers. Unless… hey, I’ve got an idea: maybe the U.S. could just take over all those companies and give everyone all the sick days they need! Just the seeds of an idea for the fertile ground at CAP to let grow and prosper.
climbs to 86 percent for food service workers
Which future Democratic clients do we know who make up a large number of workers in that field?
April 27th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
If someone in your kitchen has Hep A, and customers contract it, it’s fairly easy to isolate the source and shut it down. Same with ones with gastric symptoms: when a bunch of people get the shits, people start looking for a food source to blame.
Unspecified cold/flu/infection is easier to get away with.
Nathan: funny that, because I’d rather live in a world where people don’t make stupid either/or comparisons, but unfortunately, live in one that includes fools like you.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
God forbid Nathan should try to live in the real world instead of the imaginary world of libertooney false dichotomies.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
It was only a matter of time before long-time hate campaigner Lonewacko arrived to blame TheBrownMenace.
Has he claimed that swine flu is biological warfare yet?
April 27th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
It’s also worth noting that if biologist Paul Ewald’s theory about the evolution of virulence in pathogens is correct (and it probably is, at least in part), then working-while-infected will allow the virus to evolve toward more deadliness.
And when I write “evolve”, the context isn’t aeons, it’s days. Microbes mutate and evolve rapidly—even within an infected individual, various sub-varieties will evolve and compete.
Classic theory is that pathogens naturally evolve toward benignity and eventually symbiosis. Ewald agrees that, in most cases, less virulence is in both the host’s and pathogen’s interest; but he reasons that this is not always the case. To wit, if a pathogen can be very aggressive without sacrificing its ability to reproduce and infect other hosts, then it has no incentive to reduce, through evolution, its virulence.
Ewald’s core idea is that the key to this is whether the host itself is relied upon for spreading infection (by being ambulatory), or not. If there’s a external agent transmitting the pathogen, such as the mosquito with malaria, then the pathogen can be almost as virulent as possible without lessening its spread.
In this view, then, people that take palliatives and go to work or school are inadvertently “encouraging” the pathogen infecting them to increase its virulence. More aggressive and virulent strains of the pathogen infecting workers who force themselves into work are not at a competitive disadvantage against less virulent strains. Otherwise, if everyone stayed home when they had symptoms, then only strains with the very mildest of symptoms would have the advantage of many more opportunities to spread the infection (by workers who don’t even know they’re infected and thus go into work).
I’d wager that detailed studies could discover this effect at large workplaces with heavily interacting workers and conditions such that workers attend work while sick—changes of policies and such might very well result in less virulent strains of flu in the future.
At any rate, whether or not working while ill increases virulence, it certainly increases spread of infection. It’s bad public health policy to allow it.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Re: In other words, on any given day a large proportion of sick food service workers are going to find themselves unable to afford to take the day off, endangering the health of everyone else.
Tf the swine flu is anything like other influenzas I’ve had I don’t think they’ll be going to work whether they can afford to miss time or not: they just won’t be able to get out of bed.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
These proposals don’t really do much to help the increasing numbers of workers with freelance or contract employment situations. Don’t work – don’t get paid. Holidays, sick, vacation – it’s all the same.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I think I would rather live in a world that was made wealthy by free markets and thus employers offer sick days to retain employees
I guess we’re a fairly impoverished, shitty country, then, see our markets aren’t wealthy enough to offer them to any but the top half of our employees, and just a sliver of our service workers.
Conservatism is now much like late-stage Communism was– they’ve finally sort of acknowledged the shittiness of it all (the identical sized shoes, the one-family-per-room apartments, etc) but now instead promise that if we just hang in their a little bit longer and refuse to conform to the decadant ways of western Europe, we’ll face a bright, prosperous future in which all these wonderful things will finally be available.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Like everything else, this is a tradeoff issue. Sure, giving everyone 7 paid sick days sounds fine. It does raise employer costs though, which will be passed on. The people who end up being impacted the most by those passed on costs? The same low end employees you’re trying to help. It may well be the case that allotting a mandated number of sick days is a bigger benefit than the loss they’ll take in higher costs, but it’s not free.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
I’m not the first to point this out but the stats are extremely misleading. Wage earners are never going to have paid sick time because they’re paid an hourly rate. Salaried positions have been moving for years to an all-inclusive concept of PTO.
PTO is certainly better for the employers because it’s less to track & maintain and at worst is an open question as to whether this is a benefit for employees too in terms of flexibility.
There are some other factors at work – generally there’s a perception that the real go-getters come to work no matter how sick they are. If that mentality went away and was replaced by cultural pressure to stay home when sick, this would be less of an issue.
Not surprisingly, I’ve noticed that perceptions have changed with the availability of telecommuting options. No one wants to see you in the office if you’ve got a cough and could work from home.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
In other words, on any given day a large proportion of sick food service workers are going to find themselves unable to afford to take the day off, endangering the health of everyone else.
Right – but this doesn’t mean that we need to go back to paid sick time. We just need to pay more for this type of work so that the workers have the option of staying home when they’re sick.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
God forbid people actually care for themselves instead of spending 12 hours a day telling others they are too dumb or worthless to take control of their own lives. Newsflash, the real world has left you a long time ago.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Agreed, which is why I can’t figure out how conservatism and my post relate.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
No, but killing Iraqis is free, isn’t James? How much concern did you have for the tradeoffs involved in that slaughter?
James, in case you are wondering, yes I do think that your massive dishonesty in supporting the slaughter of innocents marks you as unfit to partake in conversation with decent people. The kind of people who don’t use concern troll tactics as you just did to defend the status quo.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Ah, that incredible wingnut talent for projection and irony-meter-destruction works as well as ever, I see.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
It would be wonderful if misuse of the word “socialist” were ground for instant banning from any CAP blog.
The smell of stupidity wafting from the screen each time one of these nitwits expels the word from his or her teentsy, weentsy brain onto the screen generally drives readers from their keyboards and to any place with fresh air, thus compromising their productivity and the national bottom line.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
I’m also pretty sure many things weren’t offered in many places at many times in history.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
I don’t think this is a good idea. Letting people take time off to be with family might make sense because there are genuine externalities. I don’t think thats true for sick days. If you go to work sick that will tend to not be very good for your employer or for everyone else working at the company and so I think the market will tend to work fine.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
The fall back of the armchair political scientist/sociologist/other useless major who has figured out how the internet works: “Anyone who disagrees is obviously dumber than me!!!!”
Keep rubbing those two brain cells together. You might cure cancer in several millenia.
April 27th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
It appears, you do. What fantastic, insight.
April 27th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Teh MARKET!!1! is always right.
If those customers hadn’t wanted to get infected by a short-order cook with swine flu, they would have taken their business elsewhere!
It’s just too bad that you people are too intellectually limited to see the perfect logic that is LIBERTARIANISM!!1!
April 27th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Nathan, the objectively stupid need to be called out. You for example, by suggesting that things have not been done differently before you are displaying one of the classically stupid reasons for the existence of conservatism – “change bad, do things same way good.” It’s not an argument, it’s fear and doesn’t require any intelligence. If people think you are stupid Nathan it is because your arguments to coin a phrase “suck”.
James “Kill the Brutes” Robertson is another great example. He justifies the slaughter of Iraqis by claiming that “we were already at war with them,” ignoring the fact that they were unable to generate anything resembling a defense – making it not so much a war as a series of war crimes. But that kind of sophisticated analysis eludes him. Now, you might argue that this isn’t a particularly sophisticated analysis. And you would be right, and the fact that our friend James is unable to grasp it demonstrates my point.
April 27th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
God forbid people actually care for themselves
Uh. They did. They have a job and work regularly trying to put food on the table and pay their rent. And yet they might get fired if they come down with the flu and decide to stay home.
You have this bizarre view of the world were if anything bad happens to someone, it’s because they “deserved” it. I get at least a mild case of the flu once a year. Was I not “taking care” of myself? What if I got fired for staying home because I was sick? Was that not “taking care” of myself?
We’re either a wealthy, civilized country, the wealthiest in the world, or we aren’t. It strikes me that if the country is too poor to offer the most basic of things — sick days that don’t get you fired for taking — we must be a pretty poor country who can’t afford it.
April 27th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
This one’s a bit of a no-brainer. Seven days off per year isn’t much, and it’s beneficial to have employees stay home if they’re sick so that their co-workers (and, if they work in the service industry, customers) don’t catch their illness. If people aren’t sick, will they probably use their sick days for vacation? Yes; but given the short amount of time that’s not a huge concern.
As to the question of why employers don’t give sick days if it would be beneficial overall – employers, like all other people, don’t always act rationally or think about long-term, large-scale rather than short-term interests. Classical capitalism would only conform to the model in a society of robots.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Sure, giving everyone 7 paid sick days sounds fine. It does raise employer costs though, which will be passed on.
Sure, James. I’m sorry that your four-dollar breakfast plate might become a six-dollar one to address the fact that kitchen and wait-staff no longer work on the same basis as pole-dancers. But of course, we should be thankful that the US perpetuates the master-servant relationship in the form of $2/hr waitrons drawing smiley faces on your check.
And really, Nathan: we’ve seen what happens when we give fools the benefit of the doubt, so don’t consider yourself special.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I think the “not as stupid as…” anonymous troll has passed straight into trolldom. Not willing to stand behind his words, always on a single topic, obsessed with calling people names. Pretty much the definition of a troll. Which means this will be the last time I so much as take notice of you
April 27th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
I’ve thought one solution to the problem of food service workers not getting sick days was to require any establishment serving food to post how many sick days their workers get, or at least make it public information, filed on their licensing application.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
You have this bizarre view that expensive and major things are the most basic of needs and that government is the only way they will ever be provided. Unfortunately sick days off were invented and implemented by markets and employers looking to provide the most for their employees.
To call capitalism flawed because it is composed on men who make imperfect decisions, then turn around and justify the existence of government programs and organizations populated with those same men is insane.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
…there will always be resistance to mandatory sick days because they are (somewhat rightfully) seen as equivalent to vacation days.
This is an empirical question, actually. If true, the number of paid sick days taken would depend on a single variable: the number of paid sick days offered. Further, at any level of analysis, the best prediction for the number of paid sick days not taken would be zero.
A little bit of work with the Great Gazoogle turns up some relevant data.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Nathan, are you saying that capitalism isn’t flawed?
The fact that only a few employers offer sick days — much less paid sick days — is an insanity, particularly when it comes to food service jobs, given the public health consequences. If the nation is as wealthy as you would think it is, then such basic amenities and provisions for the health of the individuals and the public would be a matter of course, as much as paved roads, running water, and sewage.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
This is an empirical question, actually. If true, the number of paid sick days taken would depend on a single variable: the number of paid sick days offered.
Depends. State and Federal jobs have a sick day policy where your sick days roll over, year after year, and can be used in the event that you develop cancer or some other serious health condition requiring long hospitalizations and recovery periods… so even if you think employees will be expected to use all of their sick days, they have an incentive to save them with the expectation of using them later.
Other employers have a limited number of sick days (like 7) that don’t roll over or a “use as needed” sick day policy, where longer-term illnesses are handled via long-term disability insurance.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Tyro, I’d say that any system is flawed – capitalism as a system tries to harness greed into a productive direction. That doesn’t always work. Socialism tends to make the mistake of assuming that people are essentially good, and will look out for others. Based on how so many people here feel about big business, I find it interesting that you are willing to trust “big government”, but feel distrust towards “big business”. At the end of the day, the large, powerful government has a lot more tools to both help and hurt people; I personally would just like to give them fewer tools, period.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Unfortunately sick days off were invented and implemented by markets and employers looking to provide the most for their employees.
In Nathanworld, markets and employers also invented health & safety regulations and child labor laws.
Did you get taught history in one of those southern high schools where they never quite get past Reconstruction? Your utter ignorance of the last century of labor relations and workplace safety would be hilarious if it weren’t such an indictment on your education.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Re: And yet they might get fired if they come down with the flu and decide to stay home.
I believe it’s illegal to fire someone for staying home when they are sick (Family Medical Leave Act). You don’t have to pay them, but you cant fire them either.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
It’s not as simple as you say, either, pseudonymous. Society had to become wealthy enough (through the success of markets) to generate enough people with the free time and interest to pass reforms (like child labor laws). Without the wealth, you don’t get any real activism – not due to a lack of interest, but due to the utter lack of time. Grinding poverty tends to fill the day with the search for food and shelter…
April 27th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
The Black Death lead to a large rise in wages.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Society had to become wealthy enough (through the success of markets) to generate enough people with the free time and interest to pass reforms (like child labor laws).
Ah, yes, thank God for the limosine-liberal leisure class with the time and interest to look out for America’s workers. Surely it wasn’t workers themselves who toiled for 12 hours a day who fought for the 8 hour work day.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
You keep using words like basic, and necessity.
Many people would disagree with your stipulation that roads are a necessity, much less a government provided necessity.
You still have not addressed the fact that governments are populated by the same people you blame for the failure of capitalism. In fact, the incompetence is more pervasive because there is no automatic and realistic oversight like there are in markets.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
You still have not addressed the fact that governments are populated by the same people you blame for the failure of capitalism.
Some humans fucked up capitalism, ergo any and all humans will fuck up government. Because humans always fuck up whatever they do.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Governments address fuckups much more slowly than markets, if at all. In a market action is voluntary. I only work because I agree to. I only buy things because I value them more than money. When I fuck up, or someone else fucks up there are consequences.
When governments fuck up they get to blame capitalism, and grab a little more power under the guise of fixing the problem.
April 27th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
“to generate enough people with the free time and interest to pass reforms (like child labor laws).”
tsg caught this, but, boy, what a stupid comment.
“I only work because I agree to. I only buy things because I value them more than money.”
So, you were apparently born so wealthy that working is an option for you? Otherwise, how will you survive? And, you only buy food because you value it more than money?
You, Nathan, are without a doubt the stupidest fucking troll ever to infest an Yglesias thread. And there have been some really stupid trolls that have posted here.
Really, shit for brains: Do you even read what you write?
April 27th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
tsg – workers faced nothing but (successful) violent pushdowns of their attempts at activism until a decent sized middle class began to politic on their behalf as well. The 19th century was not really a time of success for workers, partly because they didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to be activists, what with the long hours and low pay.
I’m not saying that was a good thing; I’m saying that a certain level of wealth is required before people have the time and inclination to work for much beyond basic needs. That’s why poor societies don’t generate many environmental activists, for instance – the people who might work in that realm are too busy trying to get by.
April 27th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
That’s why poor societies don’t generate many environmental activists, for instance – the people who might work in that realm are too busy trying to get by.
Or they’re murdered by the government.
April 27th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
One thing that I think is missed here is the nature of the work itself, and what sick days mean for the work flow as a whole.
What happens in most places if you call off sick? That’s what has been changing. It used to be, if you called off sick, your co-workers would have a bit of a busier day, but they could “carry the slack” for you. In fact, the business is really losing nothing overall. There’s no additional costs, nothing like that, other than the business following normal rules that they should leave some slack for sick days/vacations/busy days, etc. The main opposition to sick days from his point of view is being jealous that somebody is getting “something for nothing”…a major problem in our society IMO. (The jealousy, that is)
What’s happened in the last few years is that slack has been eliminated in the pursuit of efficiency. In most places, it’s actually nothing to call off work sick…as long as you can find someone to replace you. So it leads to situations where basically your work is irreplaceable yet they don’t want to pay you irreplaceable wages and benefits. Hmmm.
Sounds suspect and like a failed market to me.
In any case, that’s the reality of the situation right now. Sick days are a structural impossibility a high number of workplaces due to “productivity gains”, removing excess labor capacity from said workplaces.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:34 am
James Robertson– I’ll grant your point, since liberal entrepreneurs and their political allies were often leaders in the subject of public health and workplace conditions. Lots of chocolate-makers make the list: the Rowntrees and the Cadburys were Quakers, with that radical spark, and set the example followed by Milton Hershey.
The flipside is that while the chocolate bosses were building model villages, children were still being sent down mines. Even the more progressive owners of heavy industry objected to reforms that challenged their working practices.
There’s a more extended critique, which is to note the human cost of economic wealth in the first half of the eighteenth century, in terms of the health and welfare of those who worked the mills and furnaces. That was the subject of Engels’ 184 Condition of the Working Class in England — ironically, tsg, the product of a son of textile wealth — and his 1885 reflection on the previous forty years makes for interesting reading.
(The more radical take on bourgeois Christian socialism in the US and Britain during the late 19th c. is that it was designed to co-opt and institutionalize the working classes. I think that’s bogus.)
This is somewhat beside the point, though. Paid sick leave is not some radical socialist scheme: it is one of the things that usually distinguishes developed from developing economies, and has done so for the best part of a century. Of course, the usual way to prevent abuse is to have a doctor’s note to certify more than the odd day off, and it helps if you have a functional healthcare system for that. Employee protection is just one of those things that makes the US look backward, and gives credence to the argument that the American economy is the largest in the developing world.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:34 am
What a painful thread to get through. The merits of 7 paid sick days per year being debated with no consensus in sight. It’s like being time warped back to the 19th century. Pathetic.
How far this nation has fallen in my lifetime.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:35 am
Which is what happens when you don’t save a portion of your money regardless of your station in life. Here’s an idea for all the Socialist (oops… social democratic) engineers of society: advocate not spending all of your money. Instead of getting behind Obama’s current plans to inject more and more credit into a debt-burdened society, call for people to be sensible the way many already are if our savings rate data is correct.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:42 am
Oh, it’s Soycheese McMises, back to whine about the idea that bringing US employment law into the 20th century is HOLDING A GUN TO HIS HEAD. OH NOES!
April 28th, 2009 at 2:13 am
I notice what’s lacking from the free-marketeers, as ever, is empiricism.
More recently, Healthy Markup proposes that personal savings, if rigorously accrued, can substiture for sick days.
Going a bit further up the thread we have a statement on the potential economic burden of allowing sick days.
All of these shiny bright ideas are free from any entangling relationship to research and data, lacking even a gesture toward really existing economic models.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s, at least the libertarians were willing to say something about Hong Kong or Singapore. Recently, they’ve completely left the world behind.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:53 am
I conducted my own experiment. I lived hand to mouth the way Socialists want people to so that they are ever dependent on the state. My life was a nightmare of debt and selling off items to maintain my habits. Then one day I decided to (this will blow your mind, Benign Intennt) save a portion instead of spending all of it. Now, when I have a down month or want to not work, I don’t. It doesn’t lead to me living on a heating grate the way MY explains it. This is not a new concept requiring big, impressive studies but a simple fact: if you save some money small downturns like a week of no work don’t matter… duh. How can you argue with the simple idea that a little thrift gives you some insurance against loss? You must be one of those Keynesians.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:08 am
This truly is a sad commentary on my country when people have to debate whether or not to go to work sick and not get your coworkers sick or stay home and hope you have a job after calling in sick.Us progressives would love to have more social safety nets for all of us but you damn GOOPERS have to muck everything up because you lost in November and your still crying like kids in the school yard and you hope Obama fails.I sure hope Rummy charges you Reich wing nut jobs the same price as us on the left for his Tamaflu or our you going to cry about not getting the Reich wing Party discount price.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:12 am
Sorry, but if you have the swine flu, you are going to need more than seven sick days a year, and you have deeper concerns than losing money on taking an unpaid sick day.
There are many different arguments that could be made for and against seven paid sick days, but one that comes to mind for me is that if given the opportunity to have seven paid sick days, most people are going to take them. In other words, most people will be working at least seven fewer days per year (at least) because of this legislation. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing, but it’s what will happen.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:33 am
[...] are encouraging sick people not to go to work and issuing [...]
April 28th, 2009 at 8:09 am
workers faced nothing but (successful) violent pushdowns of their attempts at activism until a decent sized middle class began to politic on their behalf as well. The 19th century was not really a time of success for workers, partly because they didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to be activists
James, this is self-contradicting. If they didn’t have time to engage in attempts of activism, then what were the factories violently pushing down to begin with?
What you mean is that you had activists in the political sphere effectively lobbying the government to prevent the factories/mines/etc from violently attacking the workers’ activism as a counterbalance to the mines/factory owners’ influence with the government to ignore them.
In any case, in the third world, there are plenty of activist movements which it seems you would claim couldn’t possibly exist.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:32 am
I worked food service for 15 years, starting in the 80s. It’s a little odd reading this, as I’ve long felt that worker transmitted illness is a long standing systemic failure.
The choice for a worker is working sick or being fired. Period. I was told that many times.
The issue is systemic and broad. Post #57 has it mostly correct, it’s staffing levels that drive this. In and industry with great uncertainty and high risk, labor cost is one fairly controllable variable. As such, almost all kitchens work on minimal staff. There is very little flexibility for sicktime. Couple that with high turnover throughout, and most employers will fire rather then accommodate.
External correction is difficult. It basically has to hurt employers for anything to change.
Free market fixes are for the most part completely ineffective. The existing correctives mentioned here certainly are. Civil correctives (suing your employer, unemployment benefits) are no where near strong enough, and require a workforce with adequate resources to pursue them. I was relatively well educated and did not consider such measures as practical. Most food service workers face substantially more barriers.
Essentially, the market as it currently exists, optimizes for a lean workforce, which is inherently opposed to public health. This is not all that surprising, considering the whole notion of public health is extremely new.
Post #40’s idea, posting sick days allowed is interesting. I think that has some real merit, digested down to something like a “worker health score” number reported with the health score.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Based on how so many people here feel about big business, I find it interesting that you are willing to trust “big government”, but feel distrust towards “big business”.
Government is owned by, and accountable to, the voters. Business is owned by, and accountable to, the shareholders. (In theory. The present actual state of corporate governance is an interesting additional problem for free market zealots.) Since I am a voter and not a shareholder I find my preference perfectly logical. You are presumably also a voter, but maybe you wield disproportionately huge power as a shareholder and are reluctant to step down to equality with other voters?
(While on the subject of business/govt analogy, everyone is familiar with the maxim “No taxation without representation”; but why do you so seldom hear “No price/rent increases without representation”? Business’s right to be unaccountable is practically taken for granted.)
More broadly, there are lots of non-shareholders that will predictably get screwed by business but few non-voters that will predictably get screwed by government: children are only temporarily non-voters and have parents to look out for their interests, so the only permanent non-voters are immigrants that don’t obtain citizenship and felons. I’m a lot more comfortable with those groups having little influence on society than with having everyone without a substantial number of voting shares having little influence on society.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Man, this post really hits home. 14 years ago I worked in a nursing home (since then have done a lot of private work in caregiving). In the nursing home and assisted living facilities it was hard to take sick days because a) they didn’t exist and b) you got so much crap for it. If you were gone three or more days you had to get a note from your doctor. Because it helps everybody to take your doctor’s time just to tell you you have the flu or a cold, and it’s so easy for low-income workers with less access to transportation and health care to get to the doctor. Honestly I didn’t have to have that job and I did it really well and they knew that, so I told them to get stuffed when I had the flu twice in a month. You also have to deal with the fact that work that day is going to be harder for everyone else as they’ll likely be picking up your patients.
I’ve lived in Saudi, Japan, the UK and the States and I’d never want to live anywhere but here, but man, the way we do things here really sucks sometimes. Just dumb and inhumane.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Tyro: as I said upthread, I think we can grant James his point to some extent, if you look at the history of the working class in England between, let’s say, 1830 and 1850. (The US lagged behind, for obvious reasons.)
The idea that liberal elites or a burgeoning middle-class worked “on their behalf” is a simplification. (By “liberal”, I mean Whiggish new-moneyed sons of commerce of industry, along with parliamentary radicals: the founders of the Liberal Party.)
You can compare many of the reforms offered as an alternative to Chartism to those of the New Deal: they were designed to save capitalism at a time of genuine fear of revolution. But the Chartists didn’t need anybody’s help to organize.
Enough with the Victorianism. Now, let’s see if the US can be dragged into the 20th century.
April 28th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Healthy Markup
“This [personal saving to provide oneself with sick days] is not a new concept requiring big, impressive studies but a simple fact: if you save some money small downturns like a week of no work don’t matter… duh.”
That’s not a simple fact (the fact that you confuse the abstract with the factual is precisely my point ~2:30 this morning). It is simple, but whether such a “solution” would be practical and effective requires empiricism (big impressive studies done by them there fancy intellectuals).
April 28th, 2009 at 11:43 am
What fantastic insight.
Yes and… yes? So you are saying government made society so wealthy we even have the option of discussing this?
More importantly, is anything you write worth reading?
April 28th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Low-income workers can go to a Wal-Mart clinic and pay $60 for a visit with a “doc in a box,” a solution for some maladies that MY has no interest in highlighting because he doesn’t want people to be cured, but to force the world into single-payer mode at gunpoint.
April 28th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
You need an expensive study to tell you that saving money insulates you from some downturns? This is why you’re a “progressive.”
Here’s the idea: worker A puts 10% of his after-tax earnings into savings. Worker B puts 0% of his after-tax earnings onto savings. After ten weeks of this, workers A and B get head colds and don’t go to work. Question: how much money do each of them have to put towards staying at home?
April 28th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Dear God NO! Let’s go to the mid-19th century (with some social changes, of course) when taxes were almost non-existent and if you didn’t like some state’s policies you could just go to a different one. Yeah, actual freedom, that would be pretty sweet.