Quote:
Originally Posted by Aramike
Most large corporations already have some form of paid time off. So guess who this hits?
Small businesses, of course. And who's going to pay for the business owner's sick days?
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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:
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.