With COVID-19 being one of the biggest challenges for the nation, newly inaugurated President Biden released a comprehensive proposal to safely stimulate the economy while COVID-19 is still being dealt with: The American Rescue Plan. Part of the American Rescue Plan is to extend a previous guarantee of paid sick leave until September 2021. This way, anyone who gets sick can stay at home and protect their co-workers without risk of financial recourse. But should this extension of paid sick leave be permanent?
The United States is one of the few countries in the developed world whose government does not mandate that businesses provide any paid sick days for their employees. North Carolina is one of 38 states that does not guarantee paid sick leave. Pew Research Center found that one in four American workers have no paid sick leave whatsoever. Sick leave is also less likely to be guaranteed for workers making below the national median in wages. By not ensuring this for every American, we are financially disincentivizing employees from protecting their co-workers when they are sick.
In the aftermath of COVID-19, we should be looking for ways to prevent future viruses from growing into full-blown pandemics. Guaranteed paid sick leave is one of the measures that can alleviate the effects of future infections as well as future cold and flu seasons.
In 2014, the National Sanitation Foundation conducted a survey of American workers’ attitudes and experiences regarding coming to work sick. About a quarter of the respondents stated that they always go to work when they are sick. Of these respondents, 37% stated they came into work sick because they “can’t afford to be sick,” while 25% worked sick because their boss expected them to work sick. Millions of Americans go to work sick every year because they fear the financial repercussions of losing a day or two of work. As a result, they can get their co-workers sick, and their co-workers can spread the illness to people they interact with and so on. For most Americans, their workplace is the place where they spend the most time outside of their home — by keeping workplaces safe, people will be kept safe as well.
All of this is particularly relevant for student workers. Student workers are disproportionately more likely to earn less, so, as mentioned, they are less likely to be provided sick leave options. On top of that, the fewer hours that someone works, the less likely they are to receive any sick leave, so working, full-time students are also more likely to not have paid sick leave. Students are also disproportionately more likely to work jobs in retail or customer services, fields where 36% and 42% of employees are without sick leave options, respectively.
Even NC State, which does have a generous sick leave plan for full-time and half-time workers, offers no paid sick leave for employees who work less than half-time. A worker should be entitled to paid sick leave regardless of how they are scheduled to work. For workers that work half-time or more, NC State gives a prorated percentage of the full-time amount. For instance, a full-time employee receives 96 hours of sick leave a year, so a half-time employee receives 48 hours of sick leave a year. If an individual works quarter-time, then they should receive 24 hours of sick leave a year.
This dynamic not only hurts student workers, but also their co-workers, customers and visitors that enter the workplace. If a student catches an illness, they are less likely to display serious symptoms because they often have relatively strong immune systems. However, this student can easily pass illness to their older or immunocompromised work peers, who are more likely to fare worse against a disease. And this problem will only grow if students cannot have guaranteed sick leave in the future.
While we start to look towards the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to be analyzing what exactly went wrong at the beginning. The lack of guaranteed paid sick leave for every American aggravated the coronavirus just as it has the capacity to do for any contagious illness. A significant step in alleviating future viruses, as well as future cold and flu seasons, is guaranteeing workers paid sick leave in order to protect themselves, their co-workers and the general public without fear of financial recourse.
