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Don’t get sick
The United States, unlike 139 of the world’s other
nations, doesn’t have a national sick-leave policy.
Nearly half of U.S. workers don’t get any paid sick leave, and the lower you go on the pay scale, the less likely you are to have it.
Compounding that shortfall, the number of sickleave days that companies voluntarily provide is now about half what it was just five or six years ago, according to human resource experts.
That’s a bit of a problem, given that the Centers for Disease Control is strongly urging those who develop flu-like symptoms to stay home from work for seven days after the onset of illness, or a minimum of 24 hours after symptoms have resolved, whichever is longer.
The number of sick folks who will stay home for a week will be regrettably low.
Who can afford it? In this economy, who feels secure enough in his or her job to risk an absence of that length?
Most of the rest of us will be guilty of “presenteeism” — showing up, even if we don’t feel well enough to get much done in the way of work. That’s not the best plan for dealing with a possible pandemic.
Thus our parsimony in social programs becomes a public health problem. If H1N1 flu symptoms worsen, perhaps it even becomes a public health nightmare.
There are now 11 confirmed cases of H1N1 flu in Virginia, and. the good news, according to Health Commissioner Karen Remley, is that these cases are considered mild and the patients are recovering.
A work-at-all-costs mentality is a remnant of the abuses of the Industrial Revolution in which poorly paid workers risked their jobs if they dared to miss work. We don’t need a return to those barbaric conditions in which epidemics ran riot, the most horrifying example being the so-called Spanish flu of 1918 which was estimated to have killed 100 million world-wide.
Stay home if you are ill. Do it for yourself. Do it for the rest of us.
Apparently, this is a real opportunity to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
And while you’re home recovering, unpaid, worried about your job, consider whether a little turn to the left on some of our social policies is really such a frightening idea after all.
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