Paid sick leave: it’s all in the timing
Extending paid sick leave past the pandemic would be a Costly disaster
Ndp Leader Jagmeet Singh was at it again on Tuesday, holding a press conference to tell anyone who would listen about the pressing need for more paid sick leave — a policy that makes perfect sense during a pandemic, when we have a vested public health interest in ensuring people don’t show up to work sick, but has well-documented negative consequences that make it undesirable in normal times. It would only serve to place undue burdens on businesses and taxpayers, and would be ripe for abuse.
If you think you’ve heard this all before, you could be forgiven. In return for supporting the Liberals’ throne speech in the fall, Singh made hay over the fact that he pressured the government into creating a paid sick leave benefit. It took the form of the Canada recovery Sickness benefit (Crsb), which provides up to $500 a week to workers who are ill or have to self-isolate during COVID.
The problem is that practically everyone — including Singh — thinks the program is completely inadequate, as it doesn’t offer enough money for people to live on and makes recipients wait too long to receive their benefits. As a result, Singh has continued on the warpath, first attacking the provinces for not instituting their own programs, then launching a petition for the federal government to reform the Crsb.
As much as I hate to admit it, Singh has a point — within the context of the pandemic, at least. We have seen far too many outbreaks in essential workplaces, including meat-packing plants, warehouses, care homes and health-care settings. A large part of the problem could be solved through the widespread deployment of rapid testing. but we also don’t want employees to have an incentive to show up to work when they’re potentially infected.
A recent study conducted by the public health department in Peel region, north of Toronto, found that, between August 2020 and January 2021, 25 per cent of workers went to work sick, and many of them ended up testing positive for COVID-19. Numerous longterm care outbreaks have also been started by staff members, with devastating consequences.
Given the choice between paying the bills and showing up to work, or sending the kids to school, with a sore throat, many people will head out the door and hope they’re not carrying the plague. Anything that can be done to ensure people don’t have a financial incentive to spread the virus makes sense.
The risk is that a large government program such as this won’t end with the public health threat. We have already heard calls for permanent paid sick leave programs, which will only end up hurting already overburdened taxpayers and struggling businesses.
The boards of health in both Ottawa and Toronto have called on the Ontario government to institute a program that would continue to guarantee five paid sick days a year to all workers after the pandemic ends. The Ontario legislature is currently debating an Opposition bill that goes even further. And there have been similar demands made in other provinces, as well as at the federal level.
but doing so will lead to much larger numbers of people treating sick leave as additional vacation time and reduce overall productivity at a time when we need to find ways to make our economy more productive, not less. For proof, just look at all the abuse that takes place in the public sector, where gold-plated union contracts have made paid sick days the norm, rather than the exception.
Federal employees have access to up to 15 paid sick days a year. If they don’t use them, they can carry them forward, and they do so at alarming rates — by 2014, federal employees had banked 15 million sick days.
The same is true of many provincial employees, including teachers, some of whom can cash them out upon retirement as a sort of taxpayer-funded reward for eating their vegetables all their lives. In all, a 2016 report from the Canadian Federation of Independent business found that the federal and provincial governments are on the hook for $3.8 billion worth of accumulated sick days.
The idea of banking sick days makes little sense, especially considering we already have longer-term disability programs in place. It almost seems designed as a way to give public servants more vacation time without actually calling it a “vacation.” It’s little wonder that people treat them as such.
A Macdonald-laurier Institute report from five years ago found that public servants were nearly twice as likely to take sick days as their private-sector counterparts. And it’s been getting worse over time, with the average amount of time taken increasing from 7.2 days a year in 1987, to 10.6 in 2015.
Meanwhile, private-sector workers took an average of 6.4 days, and that had not changed in nearly three decades. Assuming there’s no reason why those working for the state get sick more often, this means they’re taking an extra week or so a year that they probably shouldn’t, and the productive members of society are left to foot the bill.
Likewise, five years after Ontario changed the rules to ensure teachers could no longer bank sick days, an auditor general report found that the number of sick days they were taking increased by 29 per cent. Hey, if you’re gonna lose it, might as well use it. except that they’re supposed to be used when you’re genuinely sick, not as a means of institutionalized hooky.
The problem with instituting a set number of sick days is that the duration of illnesses are variable. There may be a year when a worker doesn’t get sick at all and another in which that person has to take two weeks off for medical reasons.
In most cases, employers are understanding: as long as their employees aren’t abusing the system, they are generally free to take a few sick days here and there. And that’s the way it should be — not imposed on employers from above (which would force many of them to lay off staff or close their doors) or incorporated into a pricey new entitlement scheme (which would cost taxpayers billions of dollars we don’t have).
during the pandemic, a system like this makes sense, even though it will be abused.
In the long-run, it would be a costly disaster. The key to our economic recovery will be ensuring that the health measures and supports come to an end when the threat to public health subsides.
federal employees had banked 15 million sick days.