How do you feel about a restaurant worker with swine flu sneezing and coughing on your food when he or she prepares it or brings it to your table?
It’s something that could very well happen because, as Chuck Sheketoff points out on the Blue Oregon blog, “fewer than one in five businesses in Oregon’s leisure and hospitality industry, which includes restaurants, offer paid sick days to their employees.”
To try to slow the spread of the potentially deadly virus – which at this writing is believed to have killed 159 people in Mexico and one in Texas — the Centers for Disease Control and Oregon public health officials are urging people who are sick to stay home and avoid infecting others. But it’s tough to heed that advice when you’re barely making ends meet and missing a day’s work means losing a day’s pay.
Sheketoff, the executive director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy, points out that according to a US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate, “650,000 Oregonians – 48% of Oregon workers – are not able to take a paid sick day when they are ill.” And those who can least afford to miss a day’s work – low-wage workers in the service and other industries – are the ones least likely to have paid sick days.
“Paid sick leave is obviously important to working families and public health, but it’s also good for businesses,” Sheketoff writes. “One study estimated that employees showing up to work sick cost US businesses $150 billion a year in lost productivity – far more than the cost of letting employees stay home when sick.”
Forcing workers to be on the job when they’re sick or lose their pay is a public health hazard, it’s short-sighted business policy, and – worst of all – it’s barbaric, a practice reminiscent of the days of child labor and the 60-hour work week. There should be a federal law requiring employers to give their employees a minimum number of sick days – or, failing that, an Oregon law.
And if the legislature won’t go for that, Sheketoff offers another intriguing suggestion: “At a minimum, shouldn’t public health officials at least warn us about which employers provide paid sick leave and which don’t so we can protect ourselves?”
Works for us – although we bet the restaurant industry won’t think much of it.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.
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You really believe this is just Oregon. Most workers in the retail food industry nation wide do not receive paid days off or sick days. The only thing going for you is most states have laws that require owners to not allow workers to handle food who show certain signs of illness.
It would be nice if these workers had paid sick days, it would be more cost effective in the long run as there would be less foodborne illness, thus less use of our health care system. The problem is the smaller “mom&pop” establishments being able to afford to pay someone for not working and paying someone to take their place. Of course the big companies love the current policy. McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, they love not having to pay sick days.
No sir, we in the restaurant industry know how and where to cough and snot. I would choose another place to eat if I were you. A paid sick day is a luxury to us that work and produce from labor. Unlike the keyboard operators and pencil pushers that produce nothing but have more say so over the population than the workers. They just sit around thinking of new laws for more government revenues and bureaucracies to support them. If you don’t trust your restaurants, don’t go there! Don’t make a law that conforms them to your liking. Although that has become the new American way. I see here that we need to war against the pencil pushers rather than small businesses.
“A paid sick day is a luxury to us that work and produce from labor.”
It doesn’t have to be, and in other developed countries of the world it isn’t. Only in the US, which is still stuck in the 1930s as far as many labor policies are concerned.
“They just sit around thinking of new laws for more government revenues and bureaucracies to support them.”
Yeah, I knew this would draw that kind of comment: “Paid sick days are SOCIALIST!”
“I would choose another place to eat if I were you.”
If you let me know what restaurant you own I’ll make a point of not eating there.
Sick days are abused by most employees. The best way to handle this is to have a bank of personal days that the employee can use for sick, vacation or personal business. Intelligent businees owners realize that to keep good people you need to provide good benefits. Unfortunately the bar and restaurant businesses attracks a very unstable work force that does not stay around long enough to accrue benefits.