As I see it, this is a financial burden that should be shared. Sickness, if genuine and severe enough to stop doing your work properly or risking others health at work, is something that happens. No one is at fault, everyone is at the receiving end some way or the other. No one can foresee if you're going to be sick or not. Some are more sick, other less so.

So why not settle for a solution where the individual employee get in part paid sick leave and the employers pay some of the salary for the sick days. This way it is a loss for both, but it is an arrangement that acknowledges that the relationship between an employer and employee is usually more than a day to day exchange of money and time. You can also start with an unpaid qualifying day for the employee to weed out the long weekends, as the company often do risk aspects of the whole business, rather than only lost work time from an individual.

All in all, I'm in favour of a mandatory basic solution, which of course companies and employees then can make additions to through insurance, company rules, etc.

cheers porphy

In my company, we have unlimited Sick time. No one abuses it. The rational is that if the company treats us like professionals, the employees act like professionals.

Even with unlimited Sick time, we still have to force people to go home when they is illin.

I guess different companies have different operating environments.

If it's mandated that EVERY business has paid sick time then EVERYONE gets hit equally, so save me the "think of the small businesses!" sob story. They are on equal footing if the law is applied equally across all businesses. I have no problem taking away the competitive advantage of a business owner who runs a sweatshop and forces their sick employees to work to save a buck.

From a pragmatic standpoint, paid sick leave helps stop the spread of sickness. At my job (where we get paid sick days) you're considered pretty rude if you come in to the office while you're sick. From a business owner's standpoint, ask yourself if you'd rather have one employee out sick and have to pay them, or have 20 employees all sick and at work because they need the money, but inefficient because you didn't want to pay them. Not to mention the societal costs at large of spreading an infectious illness amongst workers, then amongst workers families, friends, etc. That business owner is imposing his cost savings for not paying the employee to stay home on the rest of society by causing the infection of and lowering the efficiency of a multitude of people who otherwise may not have been exposed to illness.

In today's world of laptop computers, VPNs, teleconferencing and ubiquitous internet access, I'm sure the employee could do their critical job tasks from home while preventing the spread of disease. The net loss in productivity would be negligible, and it wouldn't increase costs because you would have been paying those people to come in to work anyways.

UnderseaLcpl, you bring up the idea of making us uncompetitive on the world stage. In reality, mandating sick leave would align us with the rest of the world:

http://imgur.com/5Cc6E.jpg

The dark blue line is mandated sick leave, the light blue is mandated sick days.

So therefore I don't see how this would put us on unequal footing with the rest of the world.

I knew you'd come up with something good, Mark:up:
It would appear that I misstated myself. I should have said "less competitive" rather than "uncompetitive". It seems that we are behind the curve in mandated sick leave, at least.

Still, I don't consider that a reason to implement such a system. It could hardly be argued that mandating sick days is somehow going to increase productivity. As you said yourself, the days could be used to wait for the AC repairman or whatever, and I think that is how most people will use them. That's certainly the case in a lot of companies with mandated benefits of that nature, as I said before.

I also disagree with this. For a small business with only a handful of employees, mandated sick leave is more harmful than to large companies, as Aramike said. Small businesses typically don't maintain a reserve of employees or temps to fill in, and unexpected absences may neccessitate paying overtime to other employees to fill the gaps, not to mention continuing to pay the absent employee. For a business that nets only 100k anually, that adds up fast.

Furthermore, if you're working in a sweatshop, odds are you're not making much anyway, and so already qualify for many exsisting compensation benefits, including Federal unemployment and various types of medical assistance. Even if you lose your lousy job, there are plenty of others out there, even now.

The more I look at this, the more I think it is just another case of wanting something for nothing, and passing the expense along to people who actually produce things and make responsible fiscal decisions. Every fool on the planet knows that you should save money for unexpected circumstances and not live beyond your means. Just because they choose not to do so doesn't mean that all employers should have to pay for their short-sightedness.

Okay, so if this is about fairness...

Who guarantees the financial well-being of the business owner when his health becomes an issue? Or is he just screwed by the fact that he decided to create jobs rather than simply take one?