Hacker News Reader

Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

> Zero universal guaranteed paid sick leave

This is a false statement. There are 12 states which require paid sick leave, amounting to 30% of the population [1]. Federal employees are guaranteed paid sick leave days [2]. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 61% of workers have paid sick leave, 78% have paid vacations, (80%/90% in large employers with 500 or more workers) [3].

That whole section is just political garbage. There's plenty of reasons to believe that businesses will take precautions themselves to limit the spread of the virus internally, which includes offering paid sick leave to encourage people to be extra careful.

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/paid-sick... [2] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave-ad... [3] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2009/ownership/private/...

View on HN

It is a literally true statement. Universal means covering everybody. That some slices of the population have it in no way contradicts that. Indeed, most of your numbers prove that sick leave in the US is not universal.

Oddly, in this instance, "Zero" seems like the wrong description for something that is binary.

It's not "oddly", it's deliberately deceptive and trying to exaggerate the problem to advance a political narrative.

I read it as relating to the quantity of leave. E.g., a country could have "7 days per year of universal guaranteed paid sick leave".

Being charitable, it's not actually binary, because sick leave has both a quantity axis and an accessibility access. The "universal" qualifier makes the accessibility axis binary. There's still a big difference between universal 1-day-per-year paid sick leave and universal 30-day-per-year paid sick leave or what have you.

>Universal means covering everybody.

Wouldn't this mean it is an impossible goal since unemployed people don't have it. This might sound a bit snarky, but I am being serious because unemployed does account for people who are working under the radar, often through illegal means. An illegal sex worker, panhandler, or someone doing odd jobs and taking straight cash payments are likely not covered even in places that would be said to have universal paid sick leave.

Definitely not impossible. Plenty of countries give money to unemployed people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits

But that doesn't covered the sick leave portion of the claim, and in general unemployment benefits do not cover everyone who is unemployed (such as children, which is another group who may be working under the radar). It would effectively require a UBI, and even then it wouldn't qualify as being sick leave.

This is the problem with reducing it to a fully binary clarification where everything but fully true is false. 99.999% is so much easier to hit than 100%.

I'm afraid I don't understand what "sick leave" for children or people already receiving benefits would mean.

Are you trying to make an actual point about real-world responses to pandemics? Or is this just some sort of language-is-imperfect cul-de-sac you're in? If the latter, please leave me out of it.

Children work. Be it mowing a yard, working on a farm, or illegally violating labor laws and having an actual job. In some places, even in first world countries, there are children who are working under the radar (children of undocumented immigrants or children who are undocumented immigrants being an example). These children do not get paid sick leave, and thus if the standard for 'universal paid sick leave' is 'everyone gets it', then nowhere meets that standard. If you make your definition require perfection to meet it, then it won't be met. You set the standard on being literally universal a few comments ago, and I'm just showing that nowhere meets that standard.

> Or is this just some sort of language-is-imperfect cul-de-sac you're in?

Come now, have you forgotten when you said the following?

>It is a literally true statement. Universal means covering everybody. That some slices of the population have it in no way contradicts that.

Please do not suggest me being in some language-is-imperfect cul-de-sac when you were the one driving.

Or even just someone that is self employed. There's no federal law requiring them to have an agreement with themselves about what they do on days that they don't feel well.

I realize that this sounds like a really stupid comment to make.

I think it is a great counter example given the word play people are engaging in. It is a silly example, but if a silly example fits, then it suffices to show the standard itself is also silly.

It seems a variant of reductio ad absurdum but I'm not fully certain it qualifies.

Actually my point was that focusing on situations where there is not an employee-employer relationship is a tedious digression. Of course only employed people get sick time from their employer, that is what it is.

>employee-employer relationship

This seems a bit difficult to define to begin with (look at the cases with countries deciding differently for gig workers at places like Uber), and it doesn't seem to have been a qualified exception to the universal that the original comment called out.

It also achieves much the same effect as the very original article in that it allows a sort of propaganda by being able to say no countries in Europe have universal sick leave. And being able to technically make such statements, be their reasoning extremely tedious or not, is the topic at hand.

If I may nitpick your response: the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is from 2009. 2018 data suggests 71% of workers receive paid sick leave. [1]

BUT, the data is highly skewed if you look at income. [also 1] The worst paid workers also have much less paid sick leave. Only 45% of the lowest 25% income group do. According to the BLS there were 130 million workers in 2019, thus leaving roughly 15 million people (130 x 0.25 x 0.45) without paid sick leave and likely without the financial means to go on unpaid sick leave or get medical help (like testing).

Also, the average paid sick leave varies between 6-10 (working) days. Suggested quarantine is 14 days. [2] Only 3% of workers have sick days "as needed". [3] This supports the argument that these circumstances make matters worse. I tend to agree to the general argument.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/higher-wage-workers-more-l...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2019/private-industry-workers-w...

[3] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2019/ownership/civilian...

> Also, the average paid sick leave varies between 6-10 (working) days. Suggested quarantine is 14 days.

All the more reason to treat coronavirus as an exception that needs to be considered, as-needed, business by business. Or state-by-state, or county-by-county. Just because something like coronavirus happens every so often doesn't mean we need a 1-size fits all policy for every year and occasion.

I think businesses should be encouraged to play a role in helping limit the spread of the virus, but if everyone just decides they need to take 2 weeks off because of the cold, that's going to cause some economic troubles. Maybe something like that is needed this year, but for every year, that would be excessive and not help.

Yep.

Paid sick leave except for the people who, y'know, prepare food, handle groceries at checkout, and move packages around warehouses.

Better than nothing... but is it though? Like really?

Does this count people who receive PTO that made be used as paid sick leave? If so, I'm not sure it should be counted.

A person who doesn't have any paid sick leave nor PTO they can use it place of it has to take a sick day doesn't get paid for that day. One way of thinking about it is that they do get paid, but then have to give up pay equal to what they get (and all this is calculated before tax purposes). A person who has to use a PTO day that isn't only for sick leave is giving up something with a near value equal to a day of pay. In most cases, any benefits or the like are not cut for either person, meaning they still receive some level of pay when you look at the averaged out of those benefit values over the day.

This may feel like a needless distinction, but I think it matters because when a person without paid sick leave or PTO is sick they have to weigh staying home against not making money, while a person who doesn't have paid sick leave but is allowed to use PTO has to weigh staying home against losing a day of PTO that they can't use for vacation. A person with true sick leave has no such calculation, sick leave they can only use when they are sick means they aren't giving up anything. Well, there is an argument to be made for the day's worth of experience and other such matters are still loss, which for some positions can be enough to choose to work even when there is paid sick leave.

There's plenty of reasons to believe that businesses will take precautions themselves to limit the spread of the virus internally

It's not even on their radar. Not too long ago, a major university hospital in the Southern US held a town hall on the coming plague. It was an embarrassment. Several times, members of the audience asked about sick leave, in case they are under quarantine or have to care for dependents. Crickets from the leadership.

What is going to happen is that hourly support staff will drag themselves to work sick - that actually happened at an Atlanta school, a substitute teacher collapsed at work with Coronavirus and had to be taken away in an ambulance - and will spread disease to those lucky enough to enjoy better benefits.

Where is political discussion about this threat to public health?

So 22% don't have any vaccation.That is insane.

If the sick leave is limited, it isn't worth much.

38% without any sick leave is already pretty bad. How many of the rest can take 14-21 days of payed sick leave?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com