Everyone should have paid sick leave so they don't have to choose between doing the right thing (staying home) and paying rent. Everyone should have a safe working environment.
Even from a business perspective, paid sick leave is obvious. From a human perspective doubly so.
Employers are never going to get this right. Amazon specifically (and obviously they're not alone) is looking at a huge financial impact to "doing the right thing" here. Yes, we'd all want our employers to take this kind of safety seriously, and a few will, but most of them won't either because they don't care or because they're worried their competitors don't. Bezos isn't any different than anyone else here, really. Maybe someone will get to him to be kind, maybe they won't, but for employees that's just not something that's ever going to be a security guarantee.
Realistically, governments are the only entities capable of providing this kind of security in extremis. Employers, at best, get this right (due to competetive pressure) during steady state situations. When the world blows up, they can't help.
Does the government want people to have healthcare? Then the government should pay for it, not require employers to pay for it. If the government wants people to have paid leave or a pension, then they should pay for that too.
Imagine if we tied other benefits to employment. Maybe the government could require your company buy you a car and dinner every night. People need transportation and food, right? So lets make employers provide it! It's free for the government and legislators get to feel virtuous for providing it, when actually they have just offloaded their costs to someone else.
It's madness. The government should provide these things, and employers should focus on whatever it is they do best -- not being a healthcare provider.
The startup I worked for in Italy had about 40 people by the time I left.
They dedicated ZERO person hours to anything health care related. No insurance, no administration, nothing.
Italy has plenty of other obstacles for startups of course, so that in and of itself didn't make it easier to do one there - but what a nice thing for a business to be able to ignore.
Now I'm not against taxpayers paying for something so long as all taxpayers pay for that thing that everyone enjoys. What isn't right is when someone votes for a tax they won't feel the burden of.
Everyone who gets the benefit should also have skin in the game to pay for that benefit.
The real freeloaders are the well off republican voters that keep voting for more and more tax cuts, deficits be damned, putting trillions of dollars of burden onto the next generation.
By that logic, taxpayers also don't pay, but their employers do. And they don't either, but their customers do. It's the cycle of money in every economy.
But perhaps more important than that: in a democracy, the government represents the citizens (including the taxpayers). The government pays for stuff on behalf of the citizens for the benefit of the citizens. At least if the system functions correctly.
In 2017 the US spent roughly twice per person on healthcare than France ($10,224 vs $4,902) [0], the next few months will show how effective that spending has been...
[0] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
Also, if something is essential, then it's also essential for unemployed people. Providing it through employment makes no sense.
I just can't help but think that this is an incredibly naive model of how corporations function.
I'm not saying I disagree with the premise but I do think it would be incredibly helpful to the people pushing for this to give off a greater sense of how multi billion dollar corporations function. It just really can't be that simple.
Right now Amazon needs to worry that if they offer this, everyone will take off sick out of fear. They have to worry that if that happens that it won't happen to Walmart, who didn't offer the benefit. There isn't time for a feedback cycle to work, they're worried about losing a years worth of revenue right now.
You just can't trust an employer's self interest to align with ours at moments like this, for the same reason you can't trust our own self interests to align (c.f. people working when they're sick because they need the money, or sick new yorkers fleeing to other states -- both decisions made in immediate self interest).
Oh come on. Amazon make huge profits (and McDonald's and Apple and Starbucks, etc.)
Yes, providing this kind of sick leave would reduce their profits, but they are absolutely 100% capable of doing so.
In almost every developed country in the world they do.
The government just needs to make it law, then Amazon won't be at a disadvantage to their competitors, they'll all be on a level playing field.
It's just a question of what's more important - corporate profits, or employee health, safety and ability to pay rent and buy food.
That's exactly what I said.
Not taxable profits ;)
Much like how when libertarians haven't touched the levers of power in decades you get indignant tweets about how they've caused the government to fail at something, we get comments here about how the top-voted comment in a given thread is "downvoted by the libertarians."
An employer has x amount of dollars allotted for an employee. This x includes everything that the employer needs to employ you: your salary, your vacation time (and pay), you tools etc. If you require that employers provide sick leave then x is still going to stay the same. That sick leave will simply come from some other pool, such as the salary or the money allotted for training or tools.
Contractors get "higher pay + unpaid leave"
But in fact, it's misleading to call them "contractors". Back in the day, they would have been called "temps".
It doesn't have to be that way.
Every job I've ever had it's just a matter of emailing or calling my boss to say I won't be in, and that's that.
No Doctor. No authorization. No hassle. Unlimited days. Sick people shouldn't be at at work, and any job worth a damn trusts it's employees to do the right thing.
Jobs in Canada and Australia.
The importance of sick leave isn't the gross expected balance of pay and work -- as the grandparent points out, for some values those things will be equal, and employees won't prefer one or the other. (Or, better yet, employees might prefer the higher wages because there's more optionality to it -- they get paid more if they're healthy, and they get paid the same if they're unhealthy.)
That misses the point, though. The real importance of sick-leave is about marginal incentives. If an employee is sick, they don't need to weigh one more day of pay against the risk of infecting their coworkers -- they have no incentive to come into the office.
Sick leave = "stay home if sick, still get same money"
"higher pay + unpaid leave" = "stay home if sick, get less money"
Unpaid leave puts people in the position of having to decide between health (and not infecting their coworkers) and losing money. Paid sick leave instead puts employees in the position of being able to look after themselves (and their coworkers) without penalties.
It might seem like a trivial difference for people who make decent money, but it's a huge difference for people who are not in a good financial situation.
> get a doctor's note to prove you are sick
Only if you work for a company that doesn't trust its employees.
I've only worked in countries with paid sick leave, and I honestly don't remember if I ever had to present a doctor's note.
if your pay was low, and you get sick leave, then management is going to count the sick leave as part of your pay (even tho you don't necessarily use it up). This then incentivises the worker to "use up" sick leave even if they aren't sick.
Higher pay + unlimited sick leave (unpaid) means that the pay is upfront. The total amount paid being the same would mean that the worker doesn't have to fake a sickie every now and then to get their fair share of their wages. Managers also would not see any sick leave as the worker taking advantage.