Labor & Employment Law

Reports Show Paid Sick Leave Helps Everybody

By James Parks

Despite claims from business groups that paid sick leave for employees is bad for business, two new reports show everyone benefits from sick leave, including workers, the public and employers.

When workers cannot take off of work to recover from illness, or to care for a sick child or other relative, they are more likely to go into work when sick or to send a sick child to school. This represents a threat to public health due to the spread of contagious disease. A report released today by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United) bears that out. The ROC-United found that more than one-third of restaurant workers (38.1 percent) reported that a whopping  87.7 percent don’t receive paid sick days and, as a result, more than 63 percent of all restaurant workers reported cooking and serving food while sick, thus impacting consumers? health. Check out the ROC-United report here.

Three-quarters of Americans say paid sick leave should be a ?basic workers? right? and  Congress should pass legislation that guarantees workers paid sick leave, according to a survey by the Public Welfare Foundation (PWF). More than 160 countries provide paid sick leave, but not the United States.

A second report by the Drum Major Institute  (DMI) looked at San Francisco?s first-in-the nation law requiring paid sick leave. Since the law was passed in 2007, both job growth and business growth in San Francisco have consistently been greater than in the five neighboring counties of the Bay Area, none of which have enacted paid sick leave. Business growth has been greater in San Francisco for small businesses as well as large businesses.

The report shows total employment in the five neighboring counties fell by 5.2 percent between December 2006, immediately before the paid sick leave law went into effect, and December 2009, compared with only 3 percent in San Francisco. Instead, San Francisco experienced stronger employment growth than the five counties from December 2006 to December 2008 in the industries that are most affected by paid sick leave: retail, leisure and hospitality, and accommodation and food services.C

San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are the only two cities with paid sick day laws in place, but paid sick leave campaigns also are under way in more than two dozen states.

You can download a copy of the DMI  report here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on September 30, 2010 (boomark / email).