[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Corinne Ramey
Drum Major Institute for Public Policy

Until recently, I had never thought much about paid sick leave. But within this past week, leading up to an event on Wednesday that featured Sara Flocks, the co-founder of Young Workers United and one of the prominent voices behind San Francisco's first-in-the-nation paid sick leave law, I've become a big fan of this policy.

This is some of what I learned:

Anecdotally, paid sick leave is a good idea. Flocks told story after story of workers who were forced to go to work sick. She told of a server at the Cheesecake Factory whose boss told her that she would be fired if she didn't show up for work, despite the fact that she had pinkeye. So the boss "allowed" the sever to wear sunglasses. (Call me crazy, but I don't like people with pinkeye touching my food.) In another example, a woman who was pregnant and hemorrhaging lost her job because her boss told her that if she didn't come to work she'd get fired.

by David Dayen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]