Mar 8, 2020 3 min read

Like it or not, Americans love burgers, tacos and pizza, and 1 in 3 Americans visit a fast-food restaurant every day.

And many of the workers who work at the cash registers, prepare the meals or clean tables have no paid sick leave. It’s inevitable that some will trudge into work so they won’t lose a day’s pay, even if they have a cold, the flu or some other contagious illness.

It’s not appetizing to think about.

This is hardly exclusive to the fast-food industry, though. Paid sick leave becomes less common the lower you go on the wage scale, which means that employees who help care for children, the elderly, clean hotel rooms and work in retail outlets are in a position where they won’t get paid if they don’t punch the clock, regardless of their health. All told, about 25% of American workers get no paid sick leave. The United States is the sole country among 22 wealthy democracies that does not mandate some form of paid sick leave, though a handful of states and cities have mandated it (Pennsylvania is not one of them).

The possibility that a sick employee could pass their illness along to colleagues or customers is a problem in any season, but it’s become particularly worrisome as the coronavirus spreads across the United States.

Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Loyola-Marymount University in California, told The Wall Street Journal, “The impact of the coronavirus will be disproportionate. People who are not very well off will be the hardest hit.”

If there’s any good to be had from the coronavirus, it might come from lawmakers and employers realizing at last that American workers should have paid sick leave.

In fact, the lack of mandated paid sick leave might worsen the impact of the coronavirus in the United States. An op-ed in The Washington Post earlier this week pointed out that Americans “are sicker than we need to be. That reality could make a widespread coronavirus outbreak here worse than it would be in a comparable country that takes sick leave seriously.”

Assuring that workers can use paid sick leave would make sense even without the threat of the coronavirus. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that offering paid sick leave would potentially lower the number of lost workdays due to the cold or flu, and save up to $2 billion per year. Some employers contend that offering paid sick days would hurt their bottom line, but a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the research firm Impaq International found offering paid sick leave in all 50 states would only take up 0.10 to 0.29% of total payroll costs.

Cities and states that are offering paid sick leave have not experienced any loss in job growth. A 2015 study found that, two years after New York mandated paid sick leave, 85% of the city’s employers reported it had not increased their costs, and 86% supported the law.

To be human is to be sick, at least every once in a while if you’re lucky. It’s time for lawmakers and employers to acknowledge this and let workers get well without worrying about losing pay.