Vox video "Why paid sick leave is essential to beating coronavirus"

[Sarcelle]

Do you really have so low an opinion of others that you believe they cannot manage their own money and save for sick days?

I get paid vacation and paid sick days and I manage my own money, have savings for an emergency and have no debt,

One can have both good financial sense and have paid sick leave.

They’re not mutually exclusive.

 

[EXdrinker]

One can have both good financial sense and have paid sick leave.

They’re not mutually exclusive.

No one ever said they are. Is your employer forced to give you paid sick days? Or does your employer offer it as part of a benefit package to entice workers such as yourself to work there? If the latter then why do we need to force others to do this same thing if it is obviously in the interests of some businesses to freely do so?

 

[Canvas]

They save them for when their child’s daycare takes a day off or their child gets sick.

Those, in my opinion, are perfectly legit reasons to take a paid day off. If a child is sick or their school or daycare is closed, one parent might be forced not to work to take care of the child.

 

[LilyM]

EXdrinker:

EXdrinker:

Why should your boss who may have just one employee and just be scraping by, have to provide you pay when you do not work?

This is almost a direct quote from Charles Dickens‘a A Christmas Carol, which would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

I guess sick pay, paid vacations, maternity/paternity leave, etc. should be abolished as well. After all, it’s being “responsible”. Why not health insurance too? How can we be so stupid as to think we’ll never get sick? Why should my boss have to pay for something so basic for myself?

How can a boss be so stupid as to think his or her employees will never get sick, and need sick leave to tide them over, and be so imprudent as to fail to provide.for.them to some degree in that eventuality?

 

[Zaccheus]

Companies are people! Why should your boss who may have just one employee and just be scraping by, have to provide you pay when you do not work?

Companies are not people. Companies are legal concepts.
And how many companies are there in the world that have only one employee?
And why should that argument apply to companies that have thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees?
Why must the burden be placed on the worker, who may already be struggling to pay his bills, rather than the huge, often national or multi-national corporation?

 

[Socrates92]

If exdrinker is talking about people who make $20 an hour, then that is probably a white-collar or trained trade or worker with some kind of training and value to their employer. Someone making $20 an hour probably does have much more of a financial cushion to save for a rainy day, etc.
Someone making minimum wage has much less of a financial cushion there.

Right but we’re still dancing around the issue. Say you make $10/hr (or 7.50, or whatever the min wage is in your region). Do you want a dollar raise, or extra benefits? I don’t think everyone would give the same answer.

 

[Socrates92]

I get paid vacation and paid sick days and I manage my own money, have savings for an emergency and have no debt,

Now imagine if you were paid the extra 4% or 6% or whatever it was as part of your ordinary wage, and given the option whether to just work the days and make more cash, or take unpaid time off and be no worse off than with paid sick days. You’d have even more flexibility and might be even better off.

One can have both good financial sense and have paid sick leave.

One can always act with good sense, regardless how good or bad the system is. It doesn’t mean that the current system isn’t inferior.