Skip to main content

New story in Health from Time: What We Learned About Paid Sick Leave in the U.S. From the H1N1 Outbreak



The last time the U.S. experienced a pandemic, advice to working Americans was similar to the message officials are sharing today—stay home.

Similar to today’s COVID-19 outbreak, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic laid bare issues of inequality in the U.S., including disparities in paid sick leave. In 2009, the federal government did not have a federal paid sick leave policy, and it still doesn’t today, forcing U.S. workers to make the impossible choice between financial and personal health. But there are important lessons we can learn from the past, says Keshia Pollack Porter, director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Institute for Health and Social Policy.

“We know that the workers who are most in need are least likely to have access to paid sick leave,” Porter tells TIME and Retro Report. “It’s overwhelmingly low income workers, workers of color, people who work in small businesses, that just tend not to have access to these types of benefits.”

In 2009 the federal government considered an emergency paid sick leave policy in order to help contain the spread of H1N1. Although in the end, the federal government did not implement the emergency measure, many states began adopting one of their own, allowing researchers to study its impacts.

Not surprisingly, influenza-like illness rates decreased significantly in states that implemented a paid sick leave policy compared to states that didn’t.

But even with access to sick days, U.S. workers might still show up for work when sick because of cultural expectations. “We live in a society where work is important to our material wellbeing, a central part of our identity, our creativity,” says Debra Lerner, director of the Tufts Medical Center Program on Health, Work and Productivity.

As in 2009, employers today are grappling with an influx economy, and the burden of paid sick leave in the U.S. often falls on that employer, causing added financial pressure, an issue that only exists in a handful of countries around the world.

“Whether it’s through the workplace, whether it’s through state plans, health is important, work is important,” Lerner says. “When we sit back and we look at how are policies create barriers to helping people to stay healthy and helping workplaces to be healthy and productive, then we haven’t learned anything.”

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

New story in Health from Time: COVID-19 Has Been ‘Apocalyptic’ for Public Transit. Will Congress Offer More Help?

While trying to get to work over the past few months, Brittany Williams, a Seattle home care worker, has often been passed by two or three buses before one stops to let her board. Buses in her area that once carried anywhere from about 50 to 100 passengers have been limited to between 12 and 18 to prevent overcrowding in response to coronavirus, and Williams’ commute, typically a half-hour ride, now takes more than double that time. Other Seattle transit riders have described budgeting as much as an extra hour per trip to account for the reduced capacity, eating into their time at work, school or with family. Even with the ridership limits in place, Williams, 34, doesn’t feel safe on public transit. Some passengers don’t wear face coverings, and bus drivers sometimes ignore capacity limits, she says. On one ride with her seven-year-old son, she decided to get off at a stop far from her home after a driver allowed a crowd of people to board. “It’s very trying. I’ll put...
Read more

New story in Health from Time: A Montana Care Home Refused Free COVID-19 Tests. Now, Nearly Every Resident Has Coronavirus

(BILLINGS, Mont.) — It was meant to be a last line of defense to protect the most vulnerable as the coronavirus spread across the United States : Montana officials offered free testing in May for staff and residents at assisted living and long-term care facilities. But not all of them followed through, according to state data, including a facility in Billings, Montana’s largest city, that cares for people with dementia and other memory problems. The virus has infected almost every resident and killed eight, accounting for almost a quarter of Montana’s 34 confirmed deaths. Thirty-six employees also have tested positive at the facility where 59 people lived before the deaths began. Read more: ‘It’s Getting Worse.’ Nursing Home Workers Confront Risks in Facilities Devastated by Coronavirus While Montana’s rates of confirmed infections and deaths are much lower than other parts of the country, the outbreak at Canyon Creek Memory Care illustrates that even the most simple an...
Read more

New story in Health from Time: An At-Home Coronavirus Test May Be On the Way in the U.S.

As cases of COVID-19 continue to climb in the U.S. , there’s a new urgency to make sure there are as many tests as possible to diagnose people who have symptoms that might indicate an infection. Knowing if people are positive is important for guiding their next steps: self-isolation, avoiding contact with others, and, if their symptoms get worse, seeking medical care. To date, access to tests has been spotty at best across the country, and while more kits are now available than even a week ago , most are gene-based assays that take several days for commercial labs to process and produce results. That may change in about two months if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives Emergency Use Authorization to the first blood-based COVID-19 test in the U.S. Scanwell Health, an at-home test company based in California, licensed the rights to a test developed by Chinese company Innovita, which was used extensively at the height of country’s epidemic earlier this year. “The ...
Read more