When I worked front desk, it was made known that I was indispensable. We had a storm with law enforcement urging folks to stay home, and I took two buses then slogged through a flood to get into work. I caught a cold, and my supervisor said to come in unless I was running a fever, and I'd need a doctor's note for more. When I announced I had bed bugs, they were OK with an open-ended leave though!
Now a doctor's note seems to be a reasonable ask, but have you ever tried to get one? Start with limited transportation and insurance, then get into the doctor's office and ask. I think I've made 3-4 requests and at least two, I was refused any excuse. I got 24 hours off in another case. Your mileage may vary: "I work at a buffet and my typhoid may be unwelcome" could be a compelling case. But you still took two buses and showed up at the doctor's office.
Don't even think about a telemed alternative. They'll render their letter worthless with disclaimers, because the HCP didn't meet or examine you in any meaningful way.
My PCP hated these sorts of policies, so if you needed a 'doctors note' from him, he would put down whatever you wanted. No work for a week and then no heavy lifting for a month after? Sure. Need to sleep in and start work no earlier than 11am? Sure! He'd write these out as a prescription too, which was helpful in shutting up HR after.
Sick days shouldn't be countable except in extreme cases. If someone is unfortunate enough to get something that requires extended time off work, losing income shouldn't be a worry.
What is needed is a national insurance scheme that pays your salary when sick beyond some minimum that your employer has to cover.
(Devil's advocate) And employers will be happy to cover it for their employees, especially since they'll be paying them 10-20% less to account for their increased costs :)
2 weeks total over a year? Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. I’ve never actually used that much sick leave myself, but I have it if I need it. Doesn’t seem crazy to me that everybody have the same benefit (or, we could just be reasonable and not actually have sick leave and just let people stay home).
I think in most circumstances, 2 weeks illness would qualify as some level of 'extreme' -- that's rarely something not serious. So you and the parent are probably in agreement.
Two weeks is extreme? Maybe if you're a healthy 30 year old without any chronic illness - and even then bone breaks can take more than a month before you can get the cast off.
I'd guess for an average person aged 40 to 60, two consecutive weeks off would be a one in maybe five years kind of event. Any minor surgery, mental health, cancer treatment, heart issue or significant infection like shingles, pneumonia, mono, hep could easily lead to two weeks off.
Two weeks definitely isn't an every year thing for most people but it's certainly not extreme.
"The Crud", which is a southern US ailment that lasts weeks, it makes you cough and snotty, and generally lethargic. It isn't awful, but when you feel it coming on you're in for at least 2-3 weeks. It isn't serious, at all. It's just similar to or a cold that generally presents in the warm months.
I live in the northern part of the US and it’s not uncommon for people to refer to common viral infections as crud or “feeling cruddy” regardless of what time of year it occurs. But, it’s not taken to mean anything more than another way of saying you have a cold. Though I kind of understand because the combination of hot weather and cold symptoms just makes it feel worse.
I've been informed that it's possible it's a Louisiana (or thereabouts) thing. And it may be the common cold (whatever that means), but the cough lasts multiple weeks, and there's no medicine for it except guaifenesin and dextromethorphan. I've lived in the PNW, i was raised in LA County, CA, and i've spent a decade and a half in the US South.
I bet there's things you've heard of in the south that i've never heard of, too.
I have seen companies, that when confronted by this, that will send the employee to a physician vetted by the company to confirm the need for accommodation.
In the end it isn’t about the loss of money, it’s the loss of power. An agreeable doctor giving you reasonable time off to mend feels like letting employees claw back power. It’s the same with work from home policies, they’re not interested in performance, it’s control.
My former place required (and i heard still requires) notes from day one. Guess what? All the time, people went on sick leave at least for a week - gotta pay off the effort to get a note, right?
(This was before telemed though. Loved when it became available: Just answer a few questions via forms, submit - get the PDF one hour later. Beats having to take public transport to your GP who is located 30-40min away, while feeling miserable and unfit for driving yourself)
Current place wears their reasonable pants, and this is basically standard procedure: just give a quick info if you can't work today and maybe tomorrow; notes required from day three.
So? Aren't these companies "good at business"? They should be able to plan around it - if they are in fact good at business.
Many of these fast food places have executives whos monthly compensation exceeds the YEARLY compensation of these front-line employees. Its for sure not a money problem - it's an allocation problem.
Being good at business means that they know where they can easily push and get away with it to get more money in the long run.
Making it unreasonable hard to take time off will end up in fewer time off over time, and it only takes a couple words from management.
There are like thousands of times as many front line employees as executives. Whether or not it’s right for executives to make so much, it’s easy to see why a business would be much more worried about cost increases for a role with much higher scale.
The executives are good at business so they virtually exclusively license franchises to independent owner-operators who are on the hook to meet franchise standards, pay licensing fees, pay the actual employees, and still turn a profit.
Remember what is discussed in this thread. I would assume that food poisoning incidents are on another level from a few lost work hours.
But in a sense I'm sure you're right. What they fear is that if they lose control employees will go berserk with their newfound power and cost them a fortune in labour costs. It's just not a rational trade-off calculation, because then things like food poisoning and contagion would weigh much heavier than they do. Rather it's a game consideration that we mustn't appear weak here. They fear things that could be gamed because it's that sort of game to them already.
My dad went through this shit at the end of his working life. Physician in the plant, guy had been kicked out of his family practice (his father started the place!) because he was a liability. His go to answer to these guys on the factory floor was, "You're not getting any younger!" He misdiagnosed his wife's breath cancer. All sorts of horrific stuff, considering he was a GP for 40+ years.
That often opens up a lot of other cans of worms for the company to deal with. I've seen and heard of it happening for some cases of workers comp or extended illnesses, but those were cases where the company was potentially on the hook for a lot of money. The pragmatic companies will usually just quietly settle the smaller claims because it's cheaper than fighting them.
> Now a doctor's note seems to be a reasonable ask, but have you ever tried to get one?
Yes. Just needed one, and got it via a telemedicine visit (also got advised to take more time off than I would have if I didn’t have to get a doctor's note for how long I had already been off.) Whether this is an option depends, of course, on whether either your insurance or your primary care medical group offers telemedicine visits.
> Don't even think about a telemed alternative. They'll render their letter worthless with disclaimers, because the HCP didn't meet or examine you in any meaningful way.
I literally just did this (as described above), the note doesn’t have any disclaimers at all except that the return to work was contingent on both the specified time elapsing and symptoms being gone.
I deeply love that doctors, tired with this bullshit wasting their time and exposing them to all manner of unnecessary pathogens, have arrived at the solution of making it well known that they will demand excessive time off if you require your employees to get notes.
I always get a lot of enjoyment out of people finding creative ways of weaponizing corporate fear of liability in order to make them behave.
A doctor's note is not a reasonable ask, actually. It is actually unreasonable that work has so few days off available and that you need to take further of your own time to see a medical professional to give you permission to stay at home while you are ill.
Furthermore, what's a doctor going to do for my cold or flu? I'd rather take the opportunity to drop by the pharmacy for some cough drops, fruit juice, and replace the battery in my thermometer.
Lest we forget, though, Mary Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier who didn't feel sick, needed to work, and wasn't about to call in sick. In fact she defied forcible and controversial quarantine measures.
So what's an asymptomatic carrier to do in 2023? Wear a mask?
Also getting a doctors note while sick is hard if you’re feeling really unwell plus a doctors visit will cost you money if you don’t have insurance, and it will cost time too. For serios illness that requires a visit to the doctor is okay, probably not hard to obtain if already seeing a doctor.
Not to mention that often, the illness is something where just some bed rest and relaxation for a day or two is all that's needed, so not much the doctor can really do, but by coming in you've potentially exposed a lot of other people to your disease.
> Now a doctor's note seems to be a reasonable ask
Trust is a reasonable ask. Shocked me at first when my employer in the US, coming from France where doctor's notes are mandatory, didn't give a fuck because they trusted me.
I guess the difference is that in the US you can just fire someone if you suspect them of breaking your trust, whereas in France you would need a long process and paper trail with medium confidence of actually being able to go through.
This complaint is so strange. I guess an HCP is some terrible American insurance thing I haven't heard of yet? (I believe you, I just haven't encountered this.)
Out here in California, I can't set foot near a doctor's office or conclude a telemedicine without being offered a machine-generated note. Worst case, I could probably just print out the follow up emails from my provider's web page documenting the visit, and my employer would accept that.
I loathed these visits when I had to do primary care. I understand the patient's position and don't hold that against them but can we just decide as a society to let people take occasional sick days and stop wasting everyone's time with short-term sick notes, especially as these requirements disproportionately affect low SES individuals.
I'm sure someone's studied it but I would confidently bet this song and dance costs society more than the supposed malingering it is preventing.
> Now a doctor's note seems to be a reasonable ask, but have you ever tried to get one? Start with limited transportation and insurance, then get into the doctor's office and ask. I think I've made 3-4 requests and at least two, I was refused any excuse.
Is this common? I perform procedures sometimes and most of the things I do require no time off / limitations so I don't get asked a lot but I've been noticing patients seem increasingly awkward when asking for a sick note and go into a long story trying to justify the request. Haven't been sure why as I sure as shit wouldn't want to work the day after I had a biopsy but your experience provides some context.
Personally, I have an extremely low threshold to write a 2-3 day note if someone wants one which is how I was taught in medical school, I assumed this was how most physicians practiced.
Unless someone is a frequent flier asking for sick notes every week (without an appropriate reason) I wonder where the physician hesitancy is coming from, it's incredibly easy to medicolegally justify a short leave < 7 days.
Edit: Checked Cochrane out of curiosity and was surprised to see they had a review on this topic with (unsurprisingly) "very low certainty" evidence.
For self-certification < 3 days 2 studies reported an increase in work time lost of 0.54 and 1.38 days/person-year. On the other hand increasing self-certification to 50 days or 1 year had decreased impact on time off (granted it seems they only counted days off due to longer absences).
Even if these numbers are accurate for < 3 days (ignoring all the methodological flaws pointed out in the Cochrane review) this is already such a minuscule effect before factoring in the increased spread of illness, economic impact and burden on the system it's barely worth discussing.
Honestly, even assuming the worst that this is malingering for 1 day/year I feel like we're better off as a society just calling it a "wellness day" and moving on.
>can we just decide as a society to let people take occasional sick days and stop wasting everyone's time with short-term sick notes,
I see it as the few arseholes ruining the system for everyone.
That is to say, there's that arsehole who takes leave by lying about having a flu or typhoid or dysentery or whatever else and he ends up costing the company too much in wasted time and pay. So now everyone has to get a note from someone who will insure their reason for taking leave.
Which is to say, don't blame the doctors nor the honest patients and workers. Blame the few arseholes that ruin everything for the rest of us.
....you can fire people if they're being an asshole (at least in the US).
Humans are, generally speaking, fucking stupid. When they're in an organizational setting, especially when they don't want to be bothered with organizing, and have power, it's really common for people to just make "rules" about whatever minor inconvenience they perceive. You see it on workers rights subreddits a lot, one person pissed off the boss so they knee-jerk created whatever blanket rule to bludgeon everyone back into line, then everyone gets upset and it ultimately costs them more that it would have to just ignore the problem.
This is such a prominent phenomenon that it's the entire basis of running a goddamn insurgency.
> costing the company too much in wasted time and pay
If this happens it's not occasional and would be better addressed on a case by case basis.
> Blame the few arseholes that ruin everything for the rest of us.
In light of the added ~1 day/person-year of absence from a permissive self-certification process suggested by the Cochrane review I added in the edit, I would say we just call this the marginal cost of doing business instead of ruining it for everyone.
Especially considering the people impacted by such draconian policies tend to be low-wage hourly workers, the added cost would be a rounding error but as a consumer I'd also happily pay the extra ~0.3% so people can take sick days.
I would also wager that the improved wellness and morale from being treated with a modicum of respect and decency would result in productivity benefits and savings that outweigh the 0-2 extra missed days a year.
If it’s one person, then it’s going to be discussed and addressed individually. Most of the time I’ve seen someone like that, they have good reasons that you are simply not privy to.
If work ever asked me for a doctors note I’d just risk calling their bluff. Not worth it. Schools do it too, never a consequence for anyone I’ve known that just simply didn’t get one, students and workers alike.
Belgium still has policies in place. Now, you do get paid for sick days, but still, my PCP in Belgium did one thing from 9am to 2pm. Write doctor's notes for overzealous employers.
I'm still baffled every now and then about the US. That paid sick time is even a thing to discuss and that the workplace sets those rules is another of those moments.
Can anyone chime in in defense of this? Is there a side to this I'm not seeing?
Defense? “The market at work” (ignoring labor isn’t a perfect market and being an over-controlling asshole isn’t required to make a profit).
The US is just anti-labor and in love with cheap consumables. Combined, we end up with a massive case of haves and have-nots. Vacation, sick leave, retirement accounts, medical care. It’s great if you’re rich (as damn near everybody on this forum is).
My brother in law is an auto mechanic here in the US. My uncle as well, but in Scotland. While they’re overall income is pretty close (solidly middle class) the amount of financial stress in the US is MUCH MUCH higher.
It’s so short-sighted. I’d happily pay another $30k/year or more in taxes for nationalized medical, lower college costs and other things most Europeans have.
I never said any such thing. I said I’d pay that amount or more. And anybody with employer provided medical insurance is probably paying ten thousand or more into that already - with a national medical system, that money is “freed up” (probably to be taken as tax).
And between college loans and medical insurance, I probably pay close to that already. And on the medical side, I’d rather it went to a national program that didn’t tightly couple people to their employers.
If you make enough money that you would be happy "happy" paying an extra $30,000 per year, then you're either a very generous person or an outlier. Most Americans wouldn't want to pay that much extra even if they could afford to.
“ Most Americans wouldn't want to pay that much extra even if they could afford to.”
And then they pay that extra through costs for imprisonment, homelessness and other stuff. And for healthcare the US pays almost twice as much per capita than other countries. It’s just dumb.
The US federal government is not like other national governments. Any powers not enumerated in the condition rest with the state governments. As an example, murder is generally not a crime under federal law [0] despite generally being considered Bad.
Over the years, for better and worse, the interpretation of what powers the federal government are given had expanded dramatically. Even so, compelling paid sick leave at the federal level would need to rely on the interstate commerce clause.
I'm all for paid sick leave, personally, but doing it in a way that actually passes conditional muster and isn't overturned by a court isn't as easy as saying "this is a good thing, why don't we do it?"
Why should the employer pay for work that isn't being done?
If you rent a car and it doesn't work, would you pay for it?
If you rent an apartment and its unfit for habitation, would you pay for it?
If you go to the store to buy a product and it's not there, would you pay for it?
It's different if the illness is work related, of course. And it's beneficial to society if people can be sick without worrying about losing income, but is that enough to make employers pay for it? And it also doesn't seem like equal pay for equal work if worker A is sick 2 days a year and worker B is sick 20 days a year, they do about the same amount of work on days they attend and get paid the same amount anually.
To have a functioning modern society - there must be some equality of outcome. This ensures that
- Taking a business risk doesn’t leave you destitute.
- Getting unlucky due to health/climate/career doesn’t leave you on the streets.
You can either pay for such equality of outcome programs in taxes or by workplace policies. Provided the policy is economically reasonable and all employers are obliged to it - taxes or policy don’t matter much.
Well generally business success comes with higher taxes, so you don’t really get all of the upside. Whether those taxes are used for anything sensible is a different matter…
We also have bankruptcy protection, LLCs, trusts and homesteads to protect downside. Followed by unemployment insurance and various forms of welfare depending on the severity of the situation.
Risks are good for society, we have buffer to absorb them provided you aren’t betting the farm with BoA. In which case, we really should have tighter regulations to stop people from betting the farm with BoA.
The fundamental idea is that the employer is a corporation, and corporations exist through the laws defined by the government, which is (in theory) doing the will of the people.
So if the people, through the government, decree that an employer needs to pay for sick days, then that's how it would work.
After all, the company exists through the combined effort of citizens of the government! and the company trades in money that is issued by the government, and managed by the government through taxes.
Of course there's no reason the employer should have to pay directly. Why not have some sort of government program to cover people's illnesses? Or a new form of insurance? In the end, the public health improvement would be the same.
Because human beings are complex, social creatures with a range of biological outcomes. If you want to be the chief monkey, you have to keep all the other monkeys safe, healthy, and happy. Otherwise they'll bash your head in and pick a new chief monkey.
We can postulate all sorts of modern scenarios and ethics and laws and rights on top of that, but at the end of the day, if you want to have a society, everyone in it needs to be taken care of according to their own needs. Leave too many people behind and there will be upheaval.
Alternately, we could not have a society, but then there are no business owners in that scenario.
It may come to you as a surprise, but if my colleague is taking 20 sick days a year whilst I'm taking 2, I'm not jealous of them 'working less' because they are instead sick at home.
>If you rent a car and it doesn't work, would you pay for it?
The rental car company has a fleet of cars, and they will put you in one that works. It happens, cars have many moving parts and they are known to break down - the rental company knows this and will replace the car in almost all cases. Nobody is paying for something that doesn't work, but the rental company pays to get the broken car fixed, which is part of their cost of doing business.
>If you rent an apartment and its unfit for habitation, would you pay for it?
There are laws about that, for very good reason. Nobody is forcing anyone to live in squalor, though it sometimes comes down to poor people not having money and living in bad situations. People absolutely can and have sued bad landlords, and the city steps in if the people speak up. I know I've had to get the city called out to address a situation before, and the landlord paid to make it right.
>If you go to the store to buy a product and it's not there, would you pay for it?
Come on now, this is getting ridiculous. This is a non-issue. If you pay for a product and don't receive it, then that's fraud and at worst you can sue to get your money back. Usually you just get your money back.
>Why should the employer pay for work that isn't being done?
This is much like the rental car in that the employer has to pay to keep the employees healthy. They employ people to do the work, and they need to be hired, on-boarded, trained, and gain experience in the role. People aren't like cars and can't be replaced as easily. The employer should understand this and much like the rental car company keeps a fleet of cars, the employer with more than 1 employee has them for continuity of business, and paying them while sick is part of what ensures they won't need to seek a different job that will pay them while sick. It helps retain a trained and dedicated worker. It's the cost of doing business. Or, the business can suffer and be understaffed because the employer didn't account for humans ever getting sick (which humans are known to do pretty often), so if the business wants to cut corners and not pay people, then they will end up being understaffed and their business will suffer. This is really basic business stuff.
There is no other side. The problem is lack of legislation.
My sister is a physical therapist. She has a doctorate. Her work fundamentally involves being close to other people and touching them. This is one of those fields that 10-20 years ago everybody said would be booming and highly lucrative. Her sick time is counted against her vacation time.
We live in a country completely captured by corporations.
How does that work if you don't have any vacation time saved? Negative balance on vacation time, or you just don't get the time off?
In either of those cases, I would be scheduling a 1-on-1 with whoever is closest to being able to change that policy, in the smallest meeting room I can find, sitting right next to them, and then letting whatever symptoms of my illness take over. Gastric problems causing diarrhea or vomit? Congrats, I'm going to either literally poop in your lap, or vomit in your face. I'm coughing up phlegm? Sorry, here's a towel to wipe off your face. Something's bleeding? You might want to go get yourself tested for STDs and whatnot, gods know what depths I've been plumbing in my spare time. Severe pain such that I can barely sit? Your face looks nice and squishy to use as a stress ball.
They'll just turn down the meeting request, tell your supervisor what you've done and you'll suffer either real punishment or be unofficially 'punished'. You may even be fired because of "at-will" employment: Anyone can be fired for (almost) any reason at any time.
Generally you just don't get time off, or maybe you can take the time off without pay (if they're extra generous). Such is life in the USA, there is no response: You will do what the owners of capital say, or you will go hungry.
> They'll just turn down the meeting request, tell your supervisor what you've done and you'll suffer either real punishment or be unofficially 'punished'.
Well, I'm not scheduling a 1-on-1 to discuss shitting in their lap. I'll dangle some kind of carrot they can't help but go for.
Sure, after, I will probably lose my job, that's understandable; We're well past the point of civility then anyhow -- after all, we're contemplating shitting in someone's lap or bleeding onto them to potentially pass blood-borne diseases to them.
> Generally you just don't get time off, or maybe you can take the time off without pay (if they're extra generous). Such is life in the USA, there is no response: You will do what the owners of capital say, or you will go hungry.
I'm well aware, as per your opening question -- I do live in the US. What I'm trying to get at is that it's long past time to be despondent about this. It's time to be angry. It's time to shit in _someones_ lap.
The fungible benefit of money plus the freedom to take whatever time off you'd like without pay is more flexible than an assortment of non-fungible paid days off that are designated for very specific uses, with an employer getting up in your business to police your use of them.
Of course this relies on being paid enough to be able to forgo some earnings, and not being financialized so hard such that a paycheck has been spent before it's even earned. So it can't scale in popularity due to the economic feedback loop designed to keep real wages low, and the financial system primarily based on debt.
Post slavery, a lot of states in the south wanted former slaves to continue to work for free. Tipping waiters, porters, etc became common at that time, so customers could decide if the business would pay black employees or not.
Proposed bans on tipping actually went through the courts, with some southern states ruling to ban it. Eventually, the supreme court stepped in, and ensured tipping would be legal.
Anyway, modern labor laws evolved from that mess, so it's not surprising at all that paid time off is discretionary in some states.
The USA is extremely hostile to unions, and labor has virtually no ability to negotiate with capital.
For example, last Thursday the Supreme Court just ruled that unions can be sued for losses caused by striking https://archive.is/0bYhe
But that is just the last pieces of labor's power getting washed away in the USA. Already things like sympathy strikes, which give labor actual power in Europe, are completely illegal.
Instead, the employer contended in a lawsuit, “the drivers prompted the creation of the perishable product” and then waited until the concrete was inside the trucks before walking off the job.
The bar being set is intentionality in destroying property even through spoilage by setting up a situation to cause the spoilage intentionally. It’s a fairly minor erosion if it is at all.
“Losses caused by striking” is a funny way to describe the holding of the case, which was about cement truck drivers deliberately timing their strike to maximize the risk of damage to the trucks and at a minimum spoil their loads.
Or management deliberately times the cement mixing to block the strike.
Everyone seems to miss that the Court did not rule on the merits of the case. They rules on a procedural question. They ruled that the suit can go forward because intentional damage was within the realm of possibility.
Jackson dissented because she believed that NLRB has priority jurisdiction before other lawsuit venues.
I’m not sure higher pay would fix the problem. Money rarely fixes any social problem.
I hear about workers not showing up for work from a cousin who manages a restaurant. They’ll hire someone, tell them they start Monday, and then Monday comes and the person doesn’t show up.
Or a chef who has a drug/drinking problem (extremely common in the industry) calling in “sick” last minute.
Obviously there are exceptions but I’m not convinced that lower pay = less reliable employee. Very possible it’s a correlation rather than causation.
Non-monopoly businesses can't survive the free market by being nicer than legally required, unless customers are willing to pay for it and able to detect it.
I’m not convinced social safety nets would fix worker reliability (people skipping work when they’re not sick)
Work ethic, reliability, trustworthiness, etc are character traits that aren’t easily changed by a better HR policy or safety nets. Unreliable workers will still be unreliable regardless of how much they’re paid.
I thought the issue being discussed overall was presenteeism in food industry jobs causing customers to get sick. Work ethic isn’t created by not allowing humans to isolate when they’re ill either. It’s a public health issue. Will people take off sick when they’re not? Of course. I don’t think that has a social stratum. I take off when I’m not sick using my sick leave as a “mental health day,” and I’m in the upper end of the upper end of the labor force.
Aren't character traits that are encouraged by slave wages either. You care about these values? Employees care about money, "values" don't fill stomachs or pay the rent.
this is about getting paid. If I need money I'll show up to work even if I'm sick otherwise I don't get any money, I don't care about the rest, just like the employer doesn't care about me when I'm sick.
You really think that these food processing companies/restaurants pay employees enough to get some some of allegiance from them or something? that's absurd.
I mean, to some extent, there's absolutely causation.
Lower pay means you may not be able to afford a car. If the public transport in your area is lousy, you'll be late more often.
Lower pay means if you can afford a car, it's more likely to be an old beater, and if it breaks down, and you're not 110% prepared to switch to public transport on a moment's notice, you'll be late or miss work.
Lower pay means a worse living situation. You're more likely to be in an old building, with a crappy landlord, who may not care about the asbestos in the ceiling, or the black mold in the walls, or the bedbugs, and then you're more likely to get sick.
Lower pay means you can't afford good food, which means you're more likely to get sick.
Lower pay means you can't afford regular doctor visits (especially since you're also much less likely to have any sick time—paid or not—in which to go to those visits), which means you're more likely to get sick.
Lower pay makes it much more likely that you're in a high-stress job—one where you're expected to jump for superiors and customers at a moment's notice, and be punished for trying to act like a human being—which means you're more likely to get sick.
Lower pay means you're more likely to be working multiple jobs, and thus getting too little sleep. That makes it more likely that you'll oversleep sometimes and miss your alarm, and be late or miss work.
I won’t disagree with that. There’s definitely some degree of causation even if it’s not 100%.
The thing that concerns me the most is that when you go to a restaurant in the US, the majority of people there do not have any kind of health insurance, and therefore do not have access to affordable healthcare.
I have worked for an employer that offered x hours of sick leave per pay period. A number of the employees--apparently at all levels--thought that they were robbing themselves if they didn't burn all the sick leave.
On the other hand, I have been the schmuck who went to work feeling awful and possibly contagious, because sick leave had been lumped in with vacation, and I might need to take some if my child (as happens a lot on introduction to day care) got sick.
Money does fix the social problem of having no money. Penicillin isn't in it as a wonder drug.
Having a bucket of paid time off that covers anything is much better than having a separate sick/vacation bucket. You don’t have to worry about doctor’s notes
Correction: you believe that having a bucket of paid time off that covers anything is much better. Your opinion, that's fine, people are different.
When a place I worked changed from sick leave to a Personal Time Off system, I didn't like it. I used to take sick leave when I was sick. After the change, I went to work if I was sick.
I never needed a doctor's note, because they trusted me when I said I was sick. I liked working at places where peope were trusted and trustworthy.
Because it encourages people to show up to work sick if they have a vacation coming up, or at the very least do a cost-benefit analysis with regards to taking a sick day versus showing up sick. If you have a sick pool, which most people will never come close to using up, then beings sick just becomes "oh, I'm sick, better take a sick day".
Paid sick leave fixes that problem specifically. Otherwise employees will show up even when they have the flu or any other disease in order to get paid and contaminate food.
Clearly you don't want these people to get a better compensation thus incentive not to show up to work when they are sick. This isn't a "social problem", whatever that weasel expression means, this is a compensation problem.
Try 1971's “An Interim Report to the President and the Congress from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future”, chaired by John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy and paste to avoid HTTP Referer check)
Changes to the workforce size don’t correlate well with the downward wage pressure. Similarly female participation in the workforce don’t line up well with wage stagnation.
I don't know whether the claim is true, but I think this effect supports it. Women are underrepresented at the top, so you'd expect the wage pressure to be lower there.
There’s also many more people (in percentage terms and actual) that are making top level pay. The upper middle class has expanded greatly. Once the domain of lawyers, doctors, and execs, the upper middle class has been opened to a wider range of professionals.
50 years ago this class of people was <5% of people. Today it approaches 30%. The lower class has also shrunk. So this has come at an expense to the middle class.
It isn’t that the middle class is poorer but rather are closer to the lower class than upper middle. Before the middle class was much larger and more people were similar and people compared themselves that way.
This is why housing in some markets seems insane to people in other markets. And why middle class people are locked out when living in an upper middle area.
It’s usually political in nature I’ve noticed when being that specific and that would be Reagan’s first time. I go much further back than that to even prior to the Southern Strategy. It’s a tad of a red herring to look at a presidential term when it’s usually a lagging indicator.
Imagine a world where every employee not only had the sort of sick-cover nice white collar jobs in software get, but got paid sufficiently well they could afford to put their kids through college and had enough left over that they coukd walk out of any job confident that they could take months to find the next one.
Imagine a world where business had to really actually compete for workers.
"Imagine a world where every employee not only had the sort of sick-cover nice white collar jobs in software get"
Most people who propose this will then get angry when the company has to double their prices and you are essentially paying double or triple the amount for everything (since there are lots of workers in the supply chain that would get this boost in healthcare and $$$).
"they could afford to put their kids through college"
You can blame the federal government for this. The fact that anyone can get a college loan and the loan follows the student virtually for life, means colleges don't really care if you learn anything or even if you have the ability to get a job. They get their money immediately and the student is on the hook for the loan.
Loans should go directly through the university and not through the federal government. They will then have to care if a student can ever pay them back because if they don't, they won't get their money.
"Imagine a world where business had to really actually compete for workers"
Most industries compete for workers. If you don't have any specialized skill and anyone with a pulse can do your job, there will be no competition and the company will have the advantage. To ignore this (or prop it up artificially) is ignoring reality.
We should be more focused on educating workers so they can provide a value and compete in the marketplace.
"Wonder what that world would look like?"
Much different than now. Most things we enjoy now would only be enjoyed by the very wealthy. The middle class would be squeezed to a sliver.
A world where everyone takes pride in what they do. Where they realize their work is for a better good, a better world. Where they put in the effort, and do not try to defraud or manipulate the system for their own personal gain. Where everyone contributes, and adds to creating a better society for the young, and the old. For all.
It would look like everything with any modicum of scarcity is proportionately more expensive and cutting into everyones budget to be unobtainable just like today
Except that in nations that require such labor protections still have plentiful and reasonably cheap fast food. The US really does just get the worst of both worlds.
Something has to give if a greater share of sales goes to wages and benefits - it's usually the rent. Imagine: not only does labour and the customer benefit from better worker protection, the supremely unproductive real estate sector gets a smaller share. Wins for eveyone except the FIRE sector.
I remember the reactions from restaurant workers to the idea of voluntarily self isolating.
In short: "The fuck out of here." It was a bit of an eye-opener to me at the time; the idea of no paid sick leave was very strange to me and let me mentally prepare for quite a long pandemic...
Probably because if you got sick after eating at a restaurant, you wouldn't say 'wow, I contracted norovirus from a sick employee or ate old or mishandled food!'
Reminds me of the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack[1] which was investigated by the CDC and also blamed on sick workers[2] because they were the first to fall ill.
Only after internal conflicts between the Rajneeshes rose up to the surface, it turned out it was an intentional biological attack.
Netflix' Wild Wild Country is a good that covers it (eventhough it is too long, and way too nice towards the Rajneeshees).
In 1984 people were already spamming the word "terrorism" on everything?
That wasn't a terror attack. No one was terrorised or threatened. The crime was voter suppression by physically preventing people from accessing the polls.
U.S. Code Title 22 Chapter 38, Section 2656f(d) defines terrorism as: "Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents".
Actual terror is not included in many definitions of terrorism.
When I worked at Starbucks, we were threatened with "low/no hours for the next week or 2". It wasn't 'official policy', but it was certainly tolerated. 1-2 weeks is small enough that unemployment insurance won't cover that, but is extremely detrimental to the wages we got. Our store made some of the highest profits in the area, so certain policies were fuzzy. If you get my drift. That was just 1 corner cut.
Unless we were in the hospital, we came in sick.
I made your drinks sick.
I took money and got pastries sick.
I made other patrons sick.
I made other employees sick.
The one time I "got out of working sick" was when I told the shift manager that I felt very bad and requested home. She said to wait it out. And I suddenly had a bad urge to vomit. I was in the doorway of the front room and back room. Lets just say it was bad. I was sent home for illness that day.
I never quite understood the meme of getting diarrhoea after eating fast food (chiefly, taco bell) because the couple of times I'd tried it in Australia, it seemed average but entirely uneventful food and didn't cause any sort of adverse reaction for me. Nor did KFC or any other one I can think of where that's been made as a joke. It was all just... fast food.
Then the penny, rather like an anvil, dropped when I realised it must instead be describing by proxy the food safety standards inherent in US fast food vs elsewhere around the world. I hadn't then also factored this specific issue into that broader realisation, but it definitely tracks.
I don't know many people that have gotten sick and can point it back to fast food. I think its more likely that fast food will upset your stomach since its more oily than whatever you make at home.
Or maybe thats what I tell myself to not think about the food safety
Lol, wish in one hand serve food in the other. So long as we don't have universal healthcare and paid sick leave in the US poor folks are gonna make your food while they're sick.
The percent given is deceptive, it’s in fact 40% of outbreaks where the cause was known. But since many outbreaks have no known cause, it’s only 25% of all outbreaks.
Extrapolating “known cause” data to all cases is foolish - clearly if someone had been sick then the cause would be known (unless for some reason they were hiding that fact from investigators).
Even so, that 25% represents a lot of cases that could've easily been prevented. It's extremely low-hanging fruit that would quickly be acted upon in just about any other situation.
What exactly is this “extremely low-hanging fruit”? A federally fin cancer sick leave program seems the only option. Creating, maintaining, and preventing fraud in such a program seems far from easy or low-hanging.
The stats might work against your thesis: the outbreaks where the cause is unknown might be more likely to be caused by pathogens transmitted by workers.
Perhaps, but the fact remains that the title as stands is deceptive.
The direction of the deception is related to the probability investigators are unable to determine if someone working at a restaurant was sick. Which seems slight.
They should do a study like this about disease transmission at daycares and preschools
Pretty sure most parents just pump and dump their kids when sick[0]
And it’s understandable that parents do it, because their jobs kinda demand it, and their bosses are not ok with them missing work to watch after their sick kids
It’s really fascinating (and sad), how we shoot ourselves in the foot by prioritizing work and money almost above all else, including happiness and the health of our families
[0]: pumping the kids with meds in the morning before dropping them off at school
As long as this country doesn't enforce mandatory paid sick leave and as long as employers can just fire people because they're absent too often this will continue to happen.
What also doesn't help is that these are the lowest paying jobs, so you end up with someone doing 3 jobs just to keep the lights on. They cannot afford to miss work.
Now a doctor's note seems to be a reasonable ask, but have you ever tried to get one? Start with limited transportation and insurance, then get into the doctor's office and ask. I think I've made 3-4 requests and at least two, I was refused any excuse. I got 24 hours off in another case. Your mileage may vary: "I work at a buffet and my typhoid may be unwelcome" could be a compelling case. But you still took two buses and showed up at the doctor's office.
Don't even think about a telemed alternative. They'll render their letter worthless with disclaimers, because the HCP didn't meet or examine you in any meaningful way.