The case for paid sick days
GUEST COMMENTARY
Special to The Call
With Labor Day having just ended, I feel it’s appropriate to raise a matter of importance to working people. This matter became the focus of attention a year ago in the Rhode Island House and Senate. The two legislative bodies were faced with bills mandating paid sick leave for employees of businesses.
The bill came courtesy of two sponsors. Mary Ellen Goodwin introduced it in the Senate. The House version was sponsored by representative Aaron Regunberg.
What turned out to be strange about the two bills is the reaction they elicited. The restaurant industry erupted in protest over the measure. In fact, the legislation’s main proponent, Ms. Goodwin, received a profanity-laced email in the process. The email address from which the message was allegedly sent is a seafood restaurant.
But, let’s face it, the food industry is the place most in need of paid sick days. Not only because the workers are in close, constant contact with the public and each other, but also because few of the state’s estimated forty thousand restaurant workers receive any paid sick days. As a matter of fact, approximately one hundred forty thousand Rhode Island workers get no paid sick time.
This number constitutes a large percentage of all the state’s workers. Perhaps it amounts to more than 25 percent. I’m not one of them now, as I’m retired and out of the regular work force. I just never understood the reluctance of any employer to grant paid sick time.
I worked in manufacturing the last 30 years of my time in the labor force. These places where I worked offered benefit packages such as medical insurance. I looked at these medical plans and wondered why days off for sickness weren’t included. It made no sense to me that companies could offer such packages, which covered hospitalization, doctor’s visits and prescription drugs, but provided no stipulations for daily sickness compensation. I came to understand paid sick time, even if given in generous quantities, is a genuine bargain relative to medical benefits.
Another thing I came to understand is the cynical double standard most companies deploy and practice. This has to do with the different way most companies treat hourly and salaried employees. They usually offer salaried workers much higher pay and paid sick days. I want to know why employees on salary benefit both ways, but hourly workers typically don’t draw sick time compensation. Tell me how the employer can afford one but not the other.
Additionally, tell me how most employers can fail to comprehend the connection between paid sick day and related aspects of the workplace.
Take, for instance, the subject of safety on the job. Most employers prefer a safe working environment. So it seems self-evident that keeping sick workers home serves their best interest. Sick workers, like tired workers, are error prone and likely to hurt themselves as well as others. Offering them paid sick days lessens their chances of showing up ill.
As much as they help promote personal safety, paid sick time also enhances physical well being. Personnel don’t feel constrained and compelled to work while ill; they won’t make themselves sicker at the same time they make others around them sick. In other words, they won’t be causing multiple people to lose money.
Finally, paid sick days help boost morale in any firm that has them.
They serve as a safety net and life preserver. Where they exist an employee will tend to feel protected and secure. When they’re absent, a worker can feel insecure and neglected.
It’s time lawmakers and employers everywhere, not just in Rhode Island, stopped leaving workers in the lurch, which is where they land when they suffer income loss on top of illness. Rhode Island legislators addressed this issue early last fall when they finally passed something. Some businesses, I’m sure, will say they can’t afford the cost of the new law. I say, I’m not so sure why it took this long to pass such a law.