There is a strong link between paid sick leave and gender equality due to the different societal roles of men and women and their subsequent treatment in the workplace. With a great need to balance their personal and professional lives, both men and women are put in difficult situations due to employers acting on stereotypes of gender roles. Access to paid sick leave alone would not resolve this issue. Job –protection is also paramount. Job-protection for men will allow them to play an increased caretaking role providing them the opportunity for greater personal fulfillment. This in turn will free women up to dedicate more time and attention to their professional lives which, over time, will start to change employer perceptions and may lead to other societal changes such as a decrease in the gender wage gap.
Low-wage workers are the group of employees that are most in need of paid sick leave. Single parents, who are over-represented in this group, require more time off because they are alone responding to the needs of their children. Heymann, Earle and Hayes found that poor working parents are more likely than better-off families to have three weeks or more a year of illness burden to manage.[1] With only one care-giver and more illness to manage the poor require more leave, though they receive less. In addition to having limited access to leave; low-income working parents are less likely than middle-income parents to have the “flexibility at work needed to address the educational, developmental, and health needs of their children during the workday.”[2] Poor children already face educational disadvantage which is worsened by being unwell at school, having longer recovery periods and poorer health due to the poor attention paid to their preventive care and wellness. All of this perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Furthermore, more than half of the workforce does not have or cannot use paid sick days to care for sick children or other family members.[3] Provided that workplaces do not allow employees to use their paid sick leave to care for children or other family members and that ‘family’ has been narrowly defined in previous legislation, paid sick leave policy should include the right to use sick leave to care for family members and family should be broadly defined.
Poorer employees, due to their economic vulnerability, are unlikely to have sufficient savings to cover lost wages if they need to take unpaid time away from work,[4] therefore leave must be paid in order for them to realise the benefit for themselves and their families.
Being a lone caregiver, having a greater illness burden to manage, and having fewer resources can lead to difficult choices between a child’s health and lost wages. The poor become poorer through missed educational opportunity and lost wages and in some cases lost jobs.[5] Therefore, through financial security and better educational outcomes, the adoption of universal paid sick leave would help to lift people out of the lower-class and into the middle-class strengthening the robustness and stability of the country at the same time.
[1] Heymann, Earle and Hayes, “The Work, Family, and Equity Index,” 7-8.
[2] Ibid.
[3] MomsRising, “S: Sick Days, Paid.”
[4] Phillips, “Getting Time Off,” 6.
[5] Even at workplaces with paid sick leave, nearly half of workers report that management has policies that could lead to dismissal for taking too many sick days.
Kevin Miller and Sara Edelstein, “Fact Sheet,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, no. B291 (2010): http://www.iwpr.org/publications/pubs/paid-sick-days-can-help-contain-health-care-costs (accessed October 10, 2011).