Having missed a couple of work days recently as a casualty of this nastier-than-normal flu season, I’ve been thinking that what we need, besides better vaccines, are unions.
I realize unions aren’t the first thing most people think of when wracked by coughs, congestion, fever and chills. The disconnect likely is because you have paid sick leave at your job. If you or your child gets the flu, you get time off to recover without having to worry about scrimping on groceries or the rent to cover the lost income.
But millions of your fellow Americans aren’t so lucky.
Fully two-thirds of low-wage workers get no paid sick leave—none. If they get sick or a child is ill and a parent needs to stay home, he or she is out of luck, period. The unlucky tend to be in lower-paying jobs requiring less education. As the Brookings Institution notes, in a brief comparing professions and their percentages of workers with sick leave:
“Food preparation (19 percent) and personal care and service (25 percent) workers are far less likely than those in, say, computer and mathematical occupations (88 percent), to have access to paid sick days.”
If you think this inequality is wrong (psst—you should), then there are two ways to fix the problem. Either the government mandates paid sick leave for all workers, or we encourage unionization so workers and employers can negotiate such benefits, privately in the marketplace. Pressure for the former will only build, and legitimately so, if we don’t try the latter.