Wanker LTE - Sick Leave Hurts Low Wage Employees

Hurts workers


Columnist Bob Herbert's support for paid sick-leave legislation is misguided ("Catch the Flu? Too Bad for You," May 16 Perspectives). Forcing employers to give employees time off will actually hurt the very people it's intended to help.

Publicly available data suggest that sick-leave mandates increase employers' labor costs by up to 5 percent. When faced with an additional cost, businesses make offsets elsewhere. In the case of paid sick leave, that means reducing hours, benefits, wages or -- in the worst-case scenario -- the overall number of employees.

Many economists, most recently David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, have found that in the wake of government-mandated increases in labor costs, low-skilled workers feel the brunt of employee cost-cutting. By making each additional hire that much more expensive, paid sick-leave laws make it harder for low-skilled workers to find and keep jobs. Aren't they the ones we're trying to help?

JILL JENKINS
Chief Economist
Employment Policies Institute
Washington, D.C.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07142/787915-110.stm

Gee, wonder if Ms. Jenkins would like to give up her probably lavish sick/personal leave time. Doesn't that hurt the employment of overpaid jerks like her? IMHO there are too many useless think tankers - I'm sure the economy would be better off w/o them.

because increased minimum wages seem to create more jobs.......at home, where they're needed most. Sick leave, family leave, and maternity leave don't seem to make a drop in the number of employed either.

I think we're back to the lies, damn lies and statistics thing.

:wtf:

either they get clobbered for a hefty insurance copay on top of a missed paycheck or they drag booty into work and infect everybody else.

Cheap labor conservatives are so incredibly short sighted. That sick day for one employee, at least until the fever breaks, represents steady productivity for the rest. If the whole place is infected because a worker couldn't afford to stay home while he's contagious, productivity plummets.

We really shouldn't have to explain common sense like this to pubbies. It's just a measure of how selfish, ignorant, and callous they've all become that we have to!

they truly are blinded by there own greed.

Is that like, uh, a real job?

If the worker doesn't demand their fair share, it's just a gift to the leisure class. And the scare tactics are always the same. Boohoo for the business class, time for a StreetAID for all the WS brokers that the minimum wage employee keeps putting out of work. :eyes:

It makes me ill that the working class has become so flaccid and dispersed and wholly under the thumb of corporations. What do you suppose is really blocking a resurgence in the labor movement?

Dying.

:dunce:

Health care saves money in the long run because it means conditions can be treated before they get out of hand. The longer you wait for help, the sicker you get, the more you can't do your job--the more the company loses. Why are they in favor of care for high-wage workers, but not everyone else?

Economists and laid them end to end they wouldn't reach a conclusion. An economist is the science of "I think so therefore it is so!"

Yum.

People who come to work sick end up making other workers- sometimes most of the office sick, which really puts the screws to productivity.

Economists sometimes amaze me with their myopia. It's almost like one has to be exceptionally narrow minded to get an advanced econ degree.