Roger Valdez, writing for Crosscut, argues that hospitality and restaurant workers, especially, need paid sick leave not because of the risk that they’ll infect customers—there’s little empirical evidence to show that—but for the same reason everyone does: “Working while sick or injured can make the underlying condition worse.” As evidence, he points to a study about Seattle bar and restaurant workers from 2007, which found that “even the best protected and represented hospitality workers suffer most from work related illness. And of those workers, women suffer more from work related illness and injury.”
In the study, 43 percent of hospitality workers reported suffering work-related pain in the previous year. Female workers both worked the hardest and reported the most work-related pain, from things like repetitive stress injuries among hotel housekeepers.
Sick workers who keep working wind up in the emergency room and we pay for that. Workers who get sick and stay sick mean turnover, and that costs employers. And when workers get sick and stay sick they can’t move ahead economically, which means a permanent underclass of workers who work but don’t contribute more to the tax base and cost more in the long run.
The current version of the paid sick leave ordinance, which allows workers at restaurants and bars (and, presumably, in other industries that rely less heavily on tips) to trade shifts in lieu of taking paid leave seems like a sensible compromise that will prevent workers from staying sick longer than necessary, so they can get back on the job.
