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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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