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House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) is pushing an emergency bill that would require employers with more than 15 workers to provide up to five days of paid sick leave. That’s about the length of time it takes for H1N1 sufferers to stop being contagious….
….It expires in two years, only applies to workers with “flu-like symptoms” and leaves the decision to grant time off up to the employer. But business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, strenuously oppose the bill anyway.
Testifying on behalf of the National Association of Manufacturers Tuesday, A. Bruce Clarke, who runs his own 1,000-member business lobby in North Carolina, told Miller’s committee that most businesses already have comparable or more generous paid leave programs, so why bother?
This is as shortsighted as it is dishonest:
A third of the nation’s workers don’t have paid sick days — about 51 million people, according to U.S. Department of Labor estimates last spring. That percentage rises to about 40% in California, according to a study last year.
(…)
Miller cited an estimate, based on a 2004 study at Emory University, that the economy loses $180 billion in productivity a year when sick employees show up to work.
The corporate opposition would at least be understandable if Miller’s bill were a permanent, general-purpose paid-leave mandate – but it’s not. It’s a temporary emergency measure tailored specifically to get infected people out of the workplace when they have H1N1. And yet NAM, NFIB, and the Chamber are still adamantly opposed to the government telling them what to do, even when it would save them money.
Maybe this is the corporate version of opposition to motorcycle helmet laws, or maybe it’s yet another situation the Invisible (And Unwashed) Hand Of The Free Market is supposed to fix – in this case, by striking down workers to teach their foolish employers a lesson. And if some loss of life accompanies the loss of revenue, well, capitalism is a harsh mistress.
Part of me wishes the swine flu had hit a few years ago, just to watch Dubya try to balance his instinct for fearmongering against his deference to corporate interests. But the rest of me knows that whatever “strategy” he came up with probably would have ended like The Stand or Dawn Of The Dead.
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Well, after all, not everyone with flu-like symptoms actually has the flu and not everyone who comes in contact with the flu will actually contract it. So it is clearly in the business interest (which is the business of the business of the U.S.) to make sick workers work. It only figures.
Put Karl in charge of it, cause he was so bang-up in Nola.
And yeah…
Eli can observe the same phenomenon in Obamaland. No need for nostalgia.
what do you get when you cross the swine flu with the bird flu?
when pigs fly flu!
I ain’t feeling so well. splame. blark………………..
I think I have the wine flu. :))
Obama’s pretty good at the deference to corporations, but he doesn’t have anywhere near Dubya’s knack for fearmongering.
Oh, and so here’s my standard rant on CDC. They are completely nonfunctional, which was made obvious during the antrax attacks when they dithered rather than doing the appropriate quaranteen. Ditto swine flu. Public info messages not the same as the force of law.
Ironically enough, flying pigs were actually the graphic on my last post…
Fair enough.
Staying well is a requirement of the job: if you get sick, it’s your fault so you pay. It’s a wonder they aren’t asking for a law to make the sick pay for their replacements.
Oh, me too. Only I didn’t know what it was called. Thanks for the diagnosis.
Sure, there are more workers where the sick ones came from. If they can work, work em. If they can’t, replace them with ones who can. Anything else is socialist.
Obama knows that fearmongering is not necessary when a president simply has to step out of the way when folks try to push back. He just has to have a keen sense of balance.
Maybe Grayson was right: the sick workers are supposed to die before they can infect anyone else.
Even during the flu epidemic in 1918, did public health officials at any level basically shut everything down?
You betcha. What else is a high unemployment rate for?
I don’t think so. I think sick workers infected the healthy is the govt’s cure for unemployment.
I saw an article a couple of weeks ago in the NY Times about some upscale restaurants forcing workers to come when sick with the flu because they were “short-handed.”
IANAL (fortunately for some people) but it sure seems like a good lawyer could make a case for culpability against some of these firms and lobby groups, especially those firms where the employees are in customer facing positions. If nothing else, the bad PR should be enough to destroy a firm or too (presumably that is part of a “cost-benefit analysis” these firms and lobby groups have performed.
Maybe some sick people should make some office calls..
Don’t know. Do you? I am not at all familiar with the history of quaranteen, but surely by 2001, the CDC should have a nodding aquaintance with it.
In an intelligent society, a reasonable medical leave during a minor (so far) epidemic would seem to be reasonable public health policy. JMO.
Yeah, I totally whiffed on that angle: It’s not just their coworkers who are at risk – it’s their customers too.
Of course, The Fix-Everything Magic Of The Free Market says that consumers will know which companies don’t have paid-leave policies, and take their business elsewhere. Problem solved!
There is some reason that Goldman Sachs got the flu shots before the health care workers.
My daughter is getting the swine flu shot at work. Restaurant.
Dya think?
Too big to ail.
My cleaning lady, whose full time job is LPN at VA, sez she’ll get the regular flu shot, but not the swine flu one because it isn’t safe. I adore her, but think she isn’t right on this score. I haven’t seen any evidence that the swine flu shot is less safe than the annual flu shot.
Anyone more informed than me?
Big time restaurant in Marin county. Ironic, cause she just got her masters in nursing and cannot find work.
FUCKED!!!
Oy. Would be funny if it weren’t true.
I have read that the reason that we haven’t gotten the swine shot before now is cause it was contaminated. Can’t remember where.
Haven’t seen that anywhere.
Being a single senior living in my own orbit, and having healthy genes, I have very little concern about flu of any sort. But I wouldn’t impose my thougts on others whose lives are not at all like mine.
Clearly H1N1 has a liberal bias.
Among the million things the Senate doesn’t do, why hasn’t the Dem leadership pushed a little harder to get Obama’s appointees approved? Oh I forgot, they can’t accomplish stuff until they achieve a hundred seat majority and even then the odds would be 50/50.
I think we need a Democratic majority within the Democratic caucus.
It’s not a live virus (like the chickenpox vaccine, from which I actually contracted chickenpox). I’d think the same warnings as the regular flu shot, avoid it if you’re allergic to eggs, etc., otherwise not too great a risk.
You had better watch out. It was the healthy fuckers that died after ww1.
I am serious.
My doctor’s office told me that the primary people who need the H1N1 shot are children (especially babies) and people with compromised immune systems and lung problems. She said that swine flu has been in this country before and that many, if not most, people have already been exposed in the past.
They will have the vaccine soon and may then give it to others. I will get my usual flu shot when they get a new supply of that.
What is it that libertarian, laizze-faire proponents of unbridled capitalism also point to? The unerring rationality of the market and all those who participate in it. Even after Alan Greenspan admitted to Congress that market rationality can work in mysterious ways [no less so apparently than the Lord] corporate types still refuse to countenance the idea that maybe they sometimes get things wrong.
Or maybe they should charge their Democratic and Republican enablers in Congress with the task of passing a bill stipulating that should employers grant employees this 5 day sick leave they will be fully compensated by the government in the form of yet more taxpaper dollars.
There is also a *compromise* to be worked out inside the revolving doors connecting Washington and New York.
I know about the egg allergy thing. Otherwise don’t know why it would be considered risky.
Link?
Dem strategists who have been working night and day on the problem have concluded that what the party should do is move farther to the right.
You’ve been reading Harry’s secret memos again.
I suppose I could go to the NYC public health site in Manhattan and get all my shots. I did so in the aftermath of 9/11 and antrax attacks.
Harry’s memos are secret? Then what have I been reading on the intertoobz?
There is always that reaction by some and to be fair, the history of mass immunizations does include some horror stories. Not as much in recent decades though.
He thinks the intertoobz is an electronic classified material vault.
I don’t have a link. It is common knowledge that the unexpected died. But I will try to find the info for you. Mainly, be careful and vigilant no matter how healthy you feel. I don’t want anything happening to you.
Bathing didn’t seem to help during the Black Plague.
Do you have a link to mass immunization horror stories?
Just the juicy parts, like all those summers he spent with Lieberman on Fire Island. Sounds like the year of the oil embargo was pretty rough.
From Wiki
Oh, pshaw. Don’t worry about lil ole me. And don’t bother searching for a link. I’m curious but not enough to make you work.
Well horror is a relative term. Here is a segment from the wiki entry on the smallpox vaccine. I’ll see if I can find more.
Who better to get the shots than the swine feeding at the trough. /s
Oh, and how many of us here can still see the scar from our smallpox vaccination?
I can – it’s on my leg and I remember getting it.
me!!!!
Your quote is from the post-erradication section of the wiki. Presuably the cost benefit analysis had changed by the time smallpox had been “eradicated.” Don’t think that’s evidence of your hypothesis at all.
I remember getting it and being told repeatedly not to pick at that big ass scab (upper left arm).
Here is another link. Sounds like most of the stories fall under the heading of urban legend. After the advent of an inoculation program, people tend to blame any and all subsequent ailments on the vaccine.
Don’t think it’s quite fair to call it MY hypothesis. The stories persist, albeit apparently without much in the way of supporting evidence. You might recall earlier in the thread my suggestion that the H1N1 vaccine was probably safe.
I’d heard tales that my dad didn’t want my older sisters to receive one of the major vaccinations, possibly polio because of purported negative consequences. I gather those were also unfounded. Anyway, by the time I came along he had dropped his objection.
We see these paradoxes all the time in financial and social situations, where what confers an advantage at an individual level has disastrous consequences in the aggregate if many people do it. So individual businesses see a gain if they don’t give time off to sick workers, but if there is an epidemic, then keeping workers on the job will help transmit the disease and result in an overall negative both for the country generally and for the individual businesses that thought they were making a smart decision. There is nothing new about this. In fact the concept is quite old and can be seen in adages like: “Penny wise and pound foolish.”
That would be my hypothesis.
Innoculation, according to my casual evidence collection, has been the greatest boon to public health in the history of the earth. Which is not to deny any of the stories about where it has caused problems. The point is to take those cases seriously and study how to avoid them.
See my 61.
Wow, that WAS a big scab if it stretched from your ass to your arm! “g”
Picking scabs is one of my favorites.
We’ve no territories or hand-to-hand conflicts requiring all our men of breeding age….. and birth control is immoral.
What’s an overpopulated country to do?
Well, if they crossed a picket line they were asking for trouble.
Oh dearie me, to be sure.
It is not just innoculation that has to be considered but taking care if you feel ill or discombobulated. Many sicken and possibly die thinking they are immune to bugs. Take care. Be smart and don’t let your ego kill you.
not fuck. what kind of fuckery is that?
I’ve heard some of those guys controlling Predators are coming down with severe carpal tunnel syndrome so they can’t wield a joystick like they used to.
How was your birthday? Any pie left?
Thanks. I’ll take care.
No pie left. Here are my girls though.
The girls gave me a big partee.
I ain’t touchin’ that one, no siree.
yep. Joy can be defined in so many ways.
Nice body art.
Lovely. Hope a wonderful time was enjoyed by all.
We do all we can not to let the grandparents see this.
Shame that they don’t approve (or at least accept), that’s such a good one.
Me going off the deep end. Bad day. Sorry.
These kids, with the music and the hair and the sex…
You have a very nice looking brood, Mary.
I know. Both daughters have ink. But only the younger one has had an incident with her grandfather about it. The problem is not just about generational stuff but about her dead father, edginess, and living in California versus Louisiana.
Only off the deep end if you were serious. Fine as snark.
My grandfather maintained that wars were necessary to prevent overpopulation and prevent unemployment. He was a bit of a hard-ass (in words), actually a pretty good guy though and a yellow-dog Democrat.
Time to leap into my tree. Big day tomorrow. Replacing the Windoze 98 machine I had built for work in 2000 with a new machine. Quite the diff. I’m stuck with Windoze 7. Gonna bring the baby home, though. That sucker’s got a lot of life left in it. Fun to program for/on.
Be good to yourselves, and all other living things.
Namaste
Please keep front paging this topic :)
G’nite SD.
I hope the Chamber of Commerce gives their servants sick days, that and they all eat organic and don’t eat out.
Sick folk Coughing in your house coughing on your food can infect even the rich. And given vaccine paranoia I bet they have not all gotten it.
lisa is upstairs
I get ten days of vacation a year, and zero sick time, paid or otherwise. I try to avoid getting sick, but not having paid sick time is better than not having a job.
There are serious risks with vaccinations, but patients are not often given that information to make an informed decision.
Here is a series of short videos on vaccines. In it is a story of a man whose baby died from vaccination. He was accused of shaking the baby, and given life in prison. Only after he started contacting medical professionals with his story was he able to put together the facts of what happened to his child.
The flu vaccines contain thimerasol, a mercury containing preservative–mercury is a known neurotoxin. They also contain antifreeze, among other things.
In this video series, a CDC official is reported to say that he would not allow his grandchild to be vaccinated because of the questions surrounding mercury in the vaccines. But they didn’t reveal that to the public.
Everyone has to make their own decisions regarding vaccines, but they need information from both sides of an issue to make an informed decision about the risks and whether they are willing to take them.