Indeed! Exactly why we need serious health care reform towards a more international style system, so that individuals no longer need to ask themselves this question constantly, and business owners no longer need to feel that they have to abet a public health crisis to stay afloat!
Regarding the OP’s question, the problem of infected workers turning up because they need a paycheck might be, in an unfortunate way, self-correcting. As the disease spreads, there might be little or no work for many of these gig workers anyway. After all, if Coronavirus hits your city hard, are you going to be going out to restaurants, or booking a ride to be driven around in a stranger’s car that might have had ten passengers before you today?
Demand for these services is going to dry up very quickly in areas known to be infected. The question then is: how do these folks get by in the days or weeks or months until business returns to (something like) normal? Should their employer companies be responsible for them? The government? If so, which level of government? Is this actually a question of “sick leave” at all, or a bigger question of social welfare policy more generally?
That’s pretty much my situation. I just logged into my HR account to check my accrued sick leave, and it’s currently 708 hours, or somewhere close to 18 weeks. I’m in a unionized state government job.
Our job also allows us to donate a certain amount of sick leave to other employees who suffer catastrophic illness or injury and use up all of their available leave. Every so often the university sends out a Catastrophic Leave Donation request on behalf of an employee, and from my understanding those requests are almost always filled up incredibly quickly.
It will be interesting to see what happens to that system if the university is hit hard by Coronavirus, because there might be a lot of people out for an extended period, and people might also become more reluctant to donate in case they end up needing to use their leave for themselves.
Fair enough
And the worker owes the business no more than work actually performed for a market rate of pay. The worker doesn’t owe the business any moral or ethical duty except to do his or her job. So if you don’t offer sick pay, and an infectious worker comes in to work and gets you, all of your staff, and some of your customers sick, then you have no cause to complain. They were just doing exactly what you contracted with them to do - a day’s work for a day’s pay.
The fact that this might end up costing you far more than a few sick days’ pay for your worker is just one of the risks you run in your business. I assume you’re fine with that trade-off?
Ignoring the fact that you’ve assigned blame to the worker for being sick, for the moment, lemme ask you: who told you what your responsibilities as a business owner to your employees were? Your father? A professor in college? The people at the business license office? Where did you get your information on these responsibilities? :dubious:
Do you consider your employees assets or liabilities?
That’s what a social safety net is for.
A little history. Chancellor von Bismarck built the first modern social safety net, not because he loved filthy peasants and proles, but to:
[ul]
[li] Steal an issue from the Socialists.[/li][li] Grow a healthier, stronger, more productive populace that paid the Kaiser more taxes.[/li][li] Dissuade the underclass from revolting and slaughtering aristos.[/li][/ul]
Germany’s interests then weren’t the interests of France, Russia, Britain, etc, just as USA interests now aren’t our enemies’ interests.
Americans who push for a sicker, weaker, poorer nation certainly fit the bill.
Back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the IRS imposed rules forcing people who were really contractors — taxi drivers and engineering consultants — to be legally treated by their employers for tax purpose as employees. Has this reversed, with people who really are employees now being treated, at employer’s whim, as contractors?
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=D'Anconia]
Please explain why you think that people should be paid for NOT working???
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People who don't get paid when they are sick often can't afford to "self-quarantine"; they'll show up for work when they are contagious because they need the paycheck. That means they can spread their germs to the people they come in contact with: co-workers, customers, other passengers on the bus or the subway, etc. If they are infected with COVID19, then based on current information, two to four percent of the people to whom they spread their germs will die. Why do you think that is less costly (for their customers, for their employers, for public health officials, or for the economy as a whole) than paying them to keep their germs in their own living spaces?
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I don't think you understand **Mr. D'Anconia**'s question, which was not about practicality, public health or economics, but about *morality*. Why *reward* the lazy workers who anyway probably got the virus by fraternizing with the wrong kind of people?Correct. The thread is about the intersection of three things. Taking an extreme position on one of those things in order to avoid addressing its intersection with the other two is leading this thread well away from the OP, which is really frustrating. By all means start your own thread about how sick leave is a tool of The Man or whatever, but I humbly ask you to keep that nonsense out of this thread.
Currently, there aren’t that many giggers, if any, that we know have this virus. There are millions being affected by it now though. In the US at least. I’m in San Francisco this week and the place is dead. I took one taxi (they pay to work in most places I’ve lived) and one Uber, and they both said there’s negligible business. The restaurants are empty. The hotels are empty, their ballrooms shuddered. Conventions canceled. They all hire temporary backfill for busy times. But not this month.
I do wonder how sick leave policies affect contagion in general. Say separate (from vacation) paid sick leave vs pooled PTO vs unpaid leave vs nothing vs fire anyone who dares show up to the office with a runny nose. It’s not just about exposing coworkers; I ride WMATA to work when I’m home. The “should” question is a policy/philosophical issue; I’m wondering if there’s any real science on the topic.
A cursory Google scholar search shows it’s a popular topic, although not necessarily addressing how I framed it.
Because it may be in the greater interests of others, including the employer, to look beyond the bottom line that’s right in front of them. If Uber drivers are driving around town and infecting riders, either because they have the virus or because other riders have it, that’s not really helping Uber. If you make hourly wage earners go to work when they’re ill with a potentially fatal virus, you’re not helping the company; you’re hurting it.
I know, I know - let companies themselves decide what’s in their best interests. No, because people have to earn money somehow and there are interests beyond the company’s interests, and governments should protect those interests. And in the end, even the corporations benefit from something that they were forced to do over their own objections.
I am not going to say that gig workers shouldn’t get sick pay - but I don’t think it’s necessarily practical for it to be provided through “employers”.
As far as the way to provide protection goes - the first step is to make sure that people are appropriately classified as employees or independent contractors. If someone is working a regularly scheduled 40 hour week in a warehouse, they’re an employee. Maybe they’re employed by the company running the warehouse or maybe by a staffing company, but they aren’t an IC. Then we have to pass laws requiring employers to provide sick leave ( an uphill battle) Then to provide sick leave to even those who truly are IC , we need a state-run system like disability insurance or unemployment that can accommodate multiple “employers” - Maybe we allow employers to use this system as well.
But what none of this addresses is a large ( maybe larger) problem )- the reluctance of people who do have adequate sick leave/PTO to “waste” it on a self-quarantine when they have no symptoms or staying out for a week or two with what appears to be a cold. People where I work get 13 sick days per year. They can ( and many have ) accumulate up to 200 days of sick leave ( separate from vacation) - and still I hear people saying they will not self-quarantine unless they are given additional sick time.
How moral is it to encourage, if not mandate, that people come to work sick and knowingly spread contagion?
It is possible to not provide paid sick leave while simultaneously discouraging or forbidding contageous people from coming in.
I’m another small business owner not giving your employees sick leave is crazy. I don’t want them coming to work sick because if the office comes down with something then I really am screwed. Right now the business pays me when I don’t work just like it pays my other employees if everyone is out sick then no one gets paid and we’re out of business.
If you aren’t getting paid when you take vacation or sick time as the owner of the company then you’ve got a really shitty business model. Keeping your employees productive is what allows them to generate work product to bring in money. Sure I’m better at what we do then any of my employees and the certainly fuck off more when I’m not around so productivity goes down when i out but they still do well enough that we’re able to pay our bills.
Because sick people infect healthy people and thus weaken the nation. If morality is at stake, shoot all sick people - problem solved, morality satisfied. If national interests are at stake, support the populace - y’know, that “We, the People” crowd. ~333 million of us.
But for the greedygutz who view people as liabilities, not assets, “We, the People” do not exist. America consists of the owners and the owned. The owned aren’t even valuable farm animals whose well-being is important, just bothersome debris, mostly the wrong kind of people. Not rich? Their own fault. Not healthy? Their own fault. Peons, peasants.
The implicit “morality” mentioned: I’m in it for ME and fuck everyone else. How saintly!
That’s true. But then it comes back to how those unpaid sick people can still manage to pay their rent. I’m not necessarily saying that the employer has to do it, but in our economy somehow, someway, bills must always continue to be paid. I think it kind of brings us back to the UBI issue.
…come to think of it, we don’t offer paid sick leave for our part-time nurses. But I certainly won’t fire anybody if they feel the need to self-quarantine due to the virus. And I’m very confident we will force them to stay home if sick.
An interesting moral dilemma we have here, which I have never before noticed.
~Max
If one of my nurses came to me and said, “shit Max, I’m sick and I can’t come in for like two weeks.” “Ah, that sucks. We’ll cover for you, get well soon.” “Actually, it more than sucks. I don’t have enough money to provide for basic needs, what will I do…”
I would probably try and work out some sort of interest-free employee advance. We do that every now and again when employees fall on especially hard times.
~Max
I think it’s more than gig workers, but I’ll focus on that as that is what you want to talk about. I’m unsure what can be done, to be honest. My gut feeling is that it will have to be some sort of publicly funded initiative, unless you are trying to drive the companies doing this out of business, which isn’t really going to help solve the issue, but will only make you feel better. There are reasons this sort of thing took off and why the companies who went this route have been relatively successful as opposed to traditional companies that did this in the past. But leaving that aside, if you REALLY want to solve this, it would need to be some sort of publicly funded initiative, perhaps tied to this particular virus, or maybe an emergency plan that can be activated going forward that if an outbreak gets to a certain level, the government will pay anyone (or anyone without sick leave, though that’s an issue too) if they have been quarantined for 21 days or whatever is required, pending them being tested to resume work.
That brings us to the non-gig workers who actually do get sick leave. The problem here is that a lot of workers are in an yearn and burn cycle, or in some cases it’s PTO (so it’s sick AND vacation bundled together). In any case, most places I’ve worked at (in the US) give only 2 weeks of sick, if they even give a separate category at all (a lot of places are PTO or Paid Time Off). In this case, let’s say they do get hit up for a 21 day quarantine. Even if they have all of their sick leave, they won’t have enough time off. In some companies they allow you to borrow leave forward, but in many they don’t. Don’t have the time off? Well, you get leave without pay or use vacation, assuming you have that. That’s going to be tough, especially for single parents. Consider…what if someone at their kids school is quarantined with the virus? They are going to shut the school down. What do parents do? Then, after that 21 days or whatever, what happens if they then get it themselves?
There is a lot to consider in this, and it’s more than the gig economy that is going to be affected. And, sadly, I don’t think many places are actually thinking about this stuff or planning for what if scenarios.
It’s possible, but it’s unlikely to be very effective. If you urge people to do X while providing them with a strong financial incentive to do not-X, the proportion who respond by doing X is likely to be signficantly reduced.
And your custodian overhears that conversation, and knowing that he’s barely making ends meet each month, he makes sure he has his cough drops ready and hides his illness as long as he can. An interest-free advance isn’t gonna work for him.
Sure, it raises everyone’s risk, but he’s not going to put his family on the street as a preventative measure.