According to the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC), the leading opponent of Milwaukee’s paid sick day leave, “This mandate will make the City of Milwaukee an island of regulation.” Unless you are one of those who believe regulation is bad on principle – except when it ensures the purity of your drinking water, the safety of your streets and the unadulterated efficacy of your medicines – then the MMAC-filed injunction against the implementation of paid sick days is absurd.
Paid sick days fulfill our better impulses of promoting strong businesses and stronger families in the city of Milwaukee. We need to ensure that the 47% of private sector workers and the 75% of low-wage workers (those making less than $10/hour) can have the access to medical care for themselves and their loved ones that the more affluent workers in this city already enjoy. No one should have to make a forced choice between working while sick and seeking necessary medical care. Those of us at Marquette who enjoy good health most of the time should be generous, not stingy, with our privilege.
We have directed much of the attention around public health in the United States to the care and treatment of chronic disorders before they turn into something worse. The paid sick day ordinance is a concrete step towards putting our laws in line with our words. It enables a mother to take her son, who has a toothache, to the dentist for treatment, instead of her son contracting a gum infection and needing the tooth extracted. It allows a pregnant woman to take time off in the first and second trimesters to secure adequate prenatal care. It gives a man who works on a construction site, exposed to the elements, time off when he catches a nasty head cold from Wisconsin’s variable weather. When he decides to “tough it out” and keep working for lack of paid leave, the head cold can turn into bronchitis or pneumonia, requiring hospitalization and further costs (often borne by Badger Care, thus indirectly by our tax dollars).
In addition, businesses have every reason to support paid sick leave: who wants to transact business with sick employees? Low-wage workers are disproportionately in the food-service and janitorial industries. Do we want sick people preparing and serving our McNuggets? Do we want to step into a hotel room when the person who cleaned it had a hacking cough? Of course not! Only the ignorant among us would be indifferent to such things. The health and safety of fellow employees and the general public is on the line for businesses whose lack of sick leave compels people to work when they are feeling ill. We should not play roulette with our own health because of the short-sighted profit-seeking policies of a few local businesses.
When the Journal Sentinel endorsed the paid sick leave referendum on October 22, 2008 – a referendum, mind you, that passed with 69% of the vote, greater than the two-thirds majority required to override a Presidential veto – staff writer Ellen Bravo quoted a McDonald’s manager who said, “I’ve lost so many good employees because they didn’t have paid sick days.” A similar measure in San Francisco has markedly reduced employee turnover without any significant deterioration in economic growth. Better-informed, longer-tenured employees are generally happier and more productive, and firms can spend less money on recruiting and training new employees. The paid sick leave measure is a winning bargain for everybody in Milwaukee, whether you are at the bottom, the top or somewhere in the middle of the economic ladder.
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