Real World

Can you please leave businesses alone. Then people wonder why it's so expensive to do business in states like ours, or why companies eventually flee, taking countless jobs with them. This bill would mean some small company with tiny margins and maybe 5 employees, would be forced to shell out 35 paid worker days for ZERO production, and somehow this is supposed to make their business more efficient? So say people who have probably never owned a lemonade stand, nevermind run one, or who have been working on the gubmit rolls for all their lives. What comes next, forcing companies to buy back those forced sick days when they aren't used, just like the gubmit does?


Patrick aide gives backing to proposal for paid sick days
Employers would have to provide

By Kyle Cheney
State House News Service / April 13, 2011

Governor Deval Patrick’s top labor adviser threw the administration’s weight behind a proposal yesterday that would require employers to allow workers to earn seven paid sick days a year, calling the proposal a “basic right.’’

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Yahoo! Buzz ShareThis .Joanne Goldstein, secretary of labor and workforce development, argued that the plan would enhance workplace productivity, and rejected assertions that sick leave policies should be left up to individual businesses.

Patrick aide gives backing to proposal for paid sick days - The Boston Globe

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

The Brandon Five

To ask the question is to answer it.

Mrs.PatsFanInVa

What do you mean by "buy back," and what types of government does this?

The Brandon Five

People save up their sick days for years and then get a big check when they leave or retire. Example:

State Workers Taking Millions In Unused Sick Pay CBS Boston

Massport Accrued Sick Bank Balance as of 1/29/2011

PatriotsReign

This kind of crap needs to end now! Sick days are for when you're sick. Hey, I can even accept calling in sick when you're not sick. But if you're never sick, good for you! But no one deserves to be compensated for not being sick unless a company wants to offer that as some sort of incentive.

But gov't workers especially shouldn't be compensated for not taking sick days. It should just be a safety-net for people not to lose a paycheck if they're sick. All small businesses should be exempt.

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Mrs.PatsFanInVa

But new employees can't do that anymore, right? Apparently, if I am reading correctly, that practice has been stopped years ago but people who worked under that particular agreement were grandfathered in.

So, ok, bummer.....but the fact that the local government no longer has a "buy back" policy shouldn't lead RW to speculate that now the government is going to force private employers to follow a "buy back" policy "just like the government does" when, in truth, the government no longer has that policy themselves.

Mrs.PatsFanInVa

So, in short, people who work for small businesses, and who generally make less money and have significantly less benefits that people who work for large businesses do, don't need the same safety net that better paid employees get if they get sick?

In other words, they can somehow better afford to lose a paycheck if they get sick than a better paid person can?

chicowalker

Why is it a business's responsibility to offer that? And why is it the government's role to force a business to offer that?

This is an issue we've struggled with in one of the businesses my partners and I own. Our company isn't profitable enough yet to offer health insurance, so where we came out is that we do offer paid sick days. (These are mostly hourly workers, at relatively low wages -- though well above minimum wage.) And we provided far more than 7 to more than 1 employee.

But to me, the crux of it is that we made the decision from a business standpoint and, as private owners, from a personal standpoint.

If the government thinks people should be paid when not working, shouldn't the government pay for it? Why push these costs onto a 3rd party (employers)? It's easy to say that a cost should be incurred when you're not the one paying for it.

(By the way, getting back to the problem lower wage employees face re illness and income, I'd speculate that lower income people have more health problems than higher income. I could be wrong, but I'd expect that it is the case and further compounds the hardships for them -- which are very real.)

Real World

No longer? Google is your friend. The policy at Massport doesn't reflect the policy at say Mass Highway, or some other city, town, or state agency. They all make their own rules, when they bend the taxpayer over during their CBA "negotiations". So I don't think it's far fetched to at least consider the possibility that the same people who want to force private businesses to give away free paid sick days, would later require those businesses to buy them back if they go unused.

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

Mrs.PatsFanInVa

I would imagine you are correct - and perhaps the fact that they, more than their better paid and compensated brethren, are forced to work while in the early stages of say, the flu, are much more likely to have it turn into pneumomia because they did not follow the standard "rest" instructions which help stave off a worsening of a disease.

They are also much more likely to spread a disease among their co-workers, and possibly customers, because they do not have the option (or luxury) of staying home while contagious.

Just from another view point - and a personal one, at that - I've worked for both kinds of places - one which had paid sick days and one which did not.

I was more more likely to stay home if I were ill from the job which didn't pay me because my mind set had become, "what difference does it make, they aren't going to pay me anyhow so they are not losing anything and I am not hurting them by staying home."

There's a part of me which believes employees tend to treat an employer as respectfully and with the same sort of integrity that the employer treats them with. If an employer thinks their employee is valuable enough to take care of, to help them out if they are ill, the employee is more likely to return the concern and think twice about causing a potential hardship (ie - calling off) in return.

Maybe that's just me, though.