Progressive Caucus
Floor Speech
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Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin. Thank you, Mr. Ellison.
I would start out by acknowledging all of the tremendous work that the 9 to 5 Organization, founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has done around the issue of the importance of providing sick pay to workers.
People may not realize it, but workers nationwide have no sick pay. That is particularly relevant right now when you consider the beginning of this global pandemic, the swine flu. We had school closings all across the country. Parents were forced to take off work to take care of their children because of the quarantine conditions that were ordered by health departments. Not only did they do it because they were responding to a potential health crisis, but families living on a budget now have to deal with the decreased wages they are experiencing.
And, of course, when children become ill, parents can't afford to miss work so they go to work anyway and infect other people at work. They send their kids to day-care and infect other children. And, of course, employers suffer, many of them who are small businesses because they find that there is a loss of productivity.
One of the greatest losses of productivity for an employer are employees who are sick. And they become sick because other workers are unwilling to lose a day's pay because of a little cold that turns out to be either the swine flu or maybe even worse, the regular flu that is quite deadly and quite contagious.
This drives up medical costs, and God forbid that a spouse or a child falls gravely ill or is seriously injured because that worker then has no choice but to immediately seek medical help and take the loved ones to a doctor or hospital, and more absenteeism occurs and they maybe end up losing their jobs because small businesses cannot really afford to have their businesses shuttered while people are ill.
In my district, 51 percent of the African American male population is jobless, and it is the largest racial disparity in unemployment and poverty in the country. Forty-three percent of the city's workers earn less than $20,000 a year, and many are among the 122,230 Milwaukeeans, which make up 47 percent of the private workforce, who do not have sick days.
Last year in my district, the city of Milwaukee approved a binding referendum on the 2008 ballot that called for private employers in the city to provide paid sick leave for all workers, and this was due in part to the diligent effort of the unions and the community groups led by the National Association of Working Women, 9 to 5. And so now, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is one of only three cities in the country to require private employers to provide paid sick days.
It is smart economically because the lack of paid sick days is hurting Milwaukee's economic development.
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Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin. Absolutely. There is also a class issue here. Seventy-nine percent of low-income workers, nearly half of our private sector workers, have no paid work sick leave. I think it is something that we take for granted as we move up the hierarchy that we can go to the dentist or we can have good prenatal care when we expand our families.
A University of Chicago survey in 2008 found that one in six workers were fired for taking personal time off for illness for themselves or a sick relative. That is absolutely egregious. Like you said, it is penny wise and pound foolish. Say you own a small business, a small dry cleaners and someone has the flu and they come to work and infect everyone, then you have to shutter the business because you can't run a business like that yourself, instead of allowing that person to stay home during that infectious period of time. You are absolutely correct.
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Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin. Well, you know, gentleman from Minnesota--thank you for yielding--it's human nature: people make economic decisions and they prioritize, unfortunately, those economic decisions over health decisions.
I think people feel lucky, that maybe they won't spread disease, that maybe if they give their kid a couple of aspirin they will feel better and they can just send them on to school anyway, because the consequences of taking off work are very imminent, that they won't be able to make this month's rent. Remember, I said 79 percent of those folks who have no paid sick time are low-wage workers, they can't risk losing that money, that $80 that day, that $65 that day, they can't afford to do it. They don't have a relative or a neighbor or a friend who can stay home with their children while they are sick so they can go to work. And so they just roll the dice, they roll the dice. And again, that lump that just didn't feel quite right in their breast, you know, they ignore it.
And it shows up in so many other data in statistics. You find poor people who succumb to illnesses and die of diseases that could be cured, not because they are more susceptible to diseases, but because they don't catch them early enough. And of course that raises the cost of health care.
We heard our colleagues talking about the high cost of health care earlier. Well, of course health care costs more once your kidneys fail and you end up on dialysis because you didn't have a simple high blood pressure pill that could have been diagnosed earlier. Of course it costs more when you don't catch cancer at its earlier stages. Of course it costs more when diseases are allowed to fester to a point that you wind up in a very expensive ambulance and an emergency room instead of a sensible doctor's visit.
We have had children in this country who have died from what started out to be an abscessed tooth, something that could have been prevented with regular visits to the dentist. We have so much proof that when you increase copayments, when there are any economic consequences of seeking health care--and not having paid sick days is an economic consequence--when there are economic consequences, people delay health care until it becomes a fire.
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Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin. Well, actually, data is conclusive that our national economy would experience a net savings of $8.1 billion a year with just providing employees with these 7 days of sick time. Because as you pointed out, gentleman, productivity is extremely important. I can remember at the time when my mother died, I was showing up at work and just staring at the wall. I was not well because of the extreme grief I was experiencing, and I was at work. And my bosses told me to get up and go home, please. And so when I came back, I was much more focused on my job. You know, that loss of productivity is not good.
The other thing is that we are human beings. And employers experience a lot of turnover because they don't have employee loyalty because they don't have a basic sense of empathy in humanity. There is no way in the world that I would want to work for an employer who couldn't empathize with my grief over having lost my mother and wouldn't give me a day or two to pull myself together. So productivity is what is lost when we don't provide sick days.
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Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin. I can tell you, gentleman from Minnesota, I have to wonder what the legal ramifications are of folks coming to work knowingly, knowing that they are sick. I mean, there's a chorus of public officials who give directives to people, saying that if you have symptoms of a pandemic, for example, the H1N1 flu virus, that you should stay at home. We hear the Centers for Disease Control say that if you're sick, if you have symptoms, stay home. We hear Dr. Richard Besser, the Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control elaborate that you don't go to school, you shouldn't get on airplanes or other large public transportation systems if you're ill. We hear
from the White House, the Press Secretary's saying clearly we all have individual responsibility for dealing with this situation, and we should all be practicing good hygiene practices and stay at home. We hear the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, telling us, again, the government can't solve this alone. We need everybody in the United States to take some responsibility. If you are sick, stay at home. We hear President Barack Obama in his 100 Days press conference saying that the key now is to make sure that we maintain good vigilance and that everybody responds appropriately and stays at home. If your child is sick, keep them out of school. We hear this over and over and over again.
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