Sick Day
It's a germ jungle out there for families. Lack of guaranteed sick days makes it worse for families on the brink.
For years, my family has had good luck avoiding holiday illness waves. We’ve vaxxed and tiptoed around new Covid variants that always seem to crop up this time of year. We dodged the infamous “trifecta” of Covid, flu, and RSV that was everywhere last holiday season. But this year, our number was up and various members of the family caught Covid, the flu, and a post-viral respiratory thing.
We’re on the mend, with the kids doing okay and the adults clawing our way back to their level. On my way there, I’ve spent a good chunk of time on the couch, meditating on the business of calling in sick.
Even before my first child was born, other parents warned me that winter months with kids were like running through a gauntlet of germs. Save your sick days, those parents cautioned. It was good advice, and like much advice offered to American workers, predicated on a garbage premise. What if my sick days ran out? What if, like approximately a quarter of private sector workers, I didn’t have any sick leave to begin with?
It’s a question facing all U.S. workers. But for parents, especially mothers, the issue is compounded by caregiving. The stakes are higher and the sick days are fewer among workers in the part-time and lower-paid fields that women are more likely to occupy.
The U.S. has no federal law guaranteeing sick days—paid or unpaid. As with the U.S.’s lack of paid parental leave, this gap leaves the U.S. behind other wealthy countries. A report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research in March 2020 found that, among 22 of the world’s wealthiest nations, the U.S. was the only that did not guarantee paid sick leave.
Instead, like so many healthcare issues, the U.S. kicks the sick day issue to states, cities, employers, or individual workers. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C. have laws providing some measure of paid sick leave, as well as 17 cities and four counties, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families.
Covered by those laws and employers’ sick leave programs, 77 percent of the private sector workforce had some access to paid sick time in 2022, per U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. That figure is up from just 63 percent in 2010. But the breakdown of access to paid sick leave is unequal across fields.
The workers most likely to receive paid sick days are also some of the best compensated, working in jobs that can often be performed with minimal in-person contact, BoL stats show. In 2022, 96 percent of workers in business, management, and financial roles had paid sick leave. These fields skew male (women are estimated to hold approximately 42 percent of management roles) while some of the fields least likely to receive paid sick days skew female.
Just over half of food service and accommodation workers had paid sick days, labor stats show. Approximately 55 percent of restaurant employees are female, according to a 2022 National Restaurant Association survey. Even within the restaurant industry, women were likelier to hold jobs that risked more in-person contact and less-generous pay packages; although 63 percent of entry-level restaurant workers and 69 percent of mid-level workers were female, just 34 percent of restaurant executives were women.
That sick day disparity becomes even starker among part-time workers, who are disproportionately (59 percent) women. Just 51 percent of part-time workers in the private sector had paid sick days in 2022.
Childcare issues often drive women to seek part-time work. Nineteen percent of part-time workers said they could not hold a full-time role due to childcare or other family and personal obligations, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Nearly a quarter of part-time workers have a minor child, and more than 80 percent of parents working part-time are mothers.
For workers with few or no paid sick days, caring for a sick child is a paradox. A child who needs care can’t be left home alone. But to skip work could mean falling behind on bills or losing a job entirely, making it harder to care for children long-term.
Some lawmakers have proposed federal policies that would expand access to paid sick leave. The Healthy Families Act introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (co-sponsored by an entirely Democratic and independent lineup) would allow employees to earn up to seven paid sick days per year.
Between my household’s sick kids and sicker parents, seven days would have just barely got us over the line.
How’s everyone feeling? Rested? Vaxxed? Holidayed out? I hope you’re staying well.
Here are some of the MomLinks I’ve hoarded while on bedrest:
-A new report on racial bias in policing in California found that the state’s schools have more police officers than social workers, and more security guards than nurses, the Guardian reports. Police took disproportionate action against students of color, handcuffing Black students in 20 percent of incidents—nearly twice the rate of their classmates.
“School-based law enforcement officers in white suburban school districts more often [view] students as charges to be protected, and school-based law enforcement officers in urban districts with a larger number of Black students more often [treat] students as criminals to be feared,” the report found.
-The Atlantic has a good dive into the long-standing conservative networks that supply Moms for Liberty’s funding and political fundamentals. “It’s not a conspiracy,” one political scientist noted. “It’s all out in the open.”
-Nebraska’s Republican governor just pulled his state from a federal program that would have fed food-insecure children over the summer. The program would have brought money into the state—$18 million in federal funds, for which Nebraska would have to pay $300,000 in administrative costs. That money would mean $40 per participating child per month over the summer break, when free or discounted school lunches become unavailable.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds also announced that her state will be opting out of the program, due to what she described as its risk of contributing to childhood weight gain. “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” Reynolds said in a statement.
-In the Guardian, tech reporter Johana Bhuiyan asks a question that’s haunted me throughout parenthood: how can extremely online parents like me protect our children’s digital privacy?
-Relatedly, I spoke with Rebecca Fishbein at the Romper about “The Fine Art of Hard-Launching A Baby.” In other words, skipping the pregnancy posts and only announcing your child’s existence after they’re born. I did this for both my children. The first time was for safety and privacy concerns. I’ve covered the far-right for years, and have accumulated a number of weird haters who like to send me threatening messages about my family. I was also conscious of the ways in which social media expects pregnancy to be a kind of performance. I wasn’t sure who I’d be as a mother, and wanted to spend those nine months learning in the privacy of my IRL world. I kept the second pregnancy secret mostly because it was funny to do a second time.
That’s all from this week’s midweek MomLeft! If you dug this installment, feel free to subscribe or forward to a friend. See you soon.