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Battling Illness When You Don’t Have Sick Leave
Providing benefits helps employees. So why does the U.S. lag behind?
Everyone gets sick from time to time, and even a short-term illness can affect our ability to do work. Yet only ten states in the U.S.A. require employers to provide paid sick leave.
There’s a federal law called the Family Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, that provides leave to some workers. However, it’s unpaid and requires documentation from a health care provider. Useful if you need to have a baby, but not for a 3-day case of the sniffles.
This lack of protection can have severe impacts on workers. Workers who don’t have paid sick leave are more likely to be impoverished. They can also end up with higher healthcare expenses, perhaps because they can’t take time off for preventative care.
Several benefits, including vacation time, paid sick days, and paid family leave, are more generous in other developed countries than in the USA. A cancer diagnosis in the U.S. can lead to a lost job and lost health insurance. That isn’t the case in many other countries.
My job does offer paid sick leave, but management was suspicious when a respiratory illness swept through our floor this past winter, and multiple people called out. As if my constant runny nose…
