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Not only are workers with paid sick leave more likely to stay home
to care for themselves or family when needed, but “more importantly,
(paid sick leave) enables workers to ‘self-quarantine’ when
necessary, without the worries of losing their job or income while
also not spreading illness to others,” which is especially important
in the food service, healthcare and child care industries, said lead
author LeaAnne DeRigne of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton
in email to Reuters Health.
“These are occupations which frequently do not offer paid sick leave
benefits,” said coauthor Patricia Stoddard-Dare of Cleveland State
University in Ohio, also by email.
While 70 percent of the U.S. workforce in full-time jobs has paid
sick leave, only 19 percent of part-time workers have that benefit,
the authors write in Health Affairs.
The researchers used data from the 2013 National Health Interview
Survey on a representative proportion of the civilian
non-institutionalized population. More than 18,000 working adults
ages 18 to 64, one from each included family, were interviewed by a
Census Bureau employee in person or by phone.
Roughly 10,500 participants had paid sick leave benefits, while
7,800 did not. Those without were more likely to be male, unmarried,
less educated, Hispanic, to work in the service industry, to work
part time, be uninsured and have poor health.
Overall, those without paid leave were three times as likely to skip
medical care for themselves compared to those with paid leave.
Uninsured people with annual family income below $35,000 were most
likely to skip medical care because of cost, with 11 percent saying
they did so in the past year. In the same income bracket, 14 percent
said a family member had delayed care because of cost.
As annual income increased, the risk of skipping care decreased, and
the risks were smaller for insured families.
Evidence suggests that paid sick leave is tied to increased job
stability and employee retention following illness, injury, or birth
of a child, increased worker productivity, decreased worker errors,
decreased accidents or injuries on the job, and when used to augment
maternity leave, paid leave increases well-baby visits, maternal
health, and the duration of breastfeeding, while also decreasing
infant mortality, the authors note in the paper.
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Delaying needed medical care can lead to more complicated,
disabling, and expensive health conditions, while missing work
without paid leave adds lost wages to the cost of medical care,
DeRigne said.
“We believe all workers should have access to guaranteed paid sick
leave benefits,” DeRigne said.
“In most countries, paid sick leave is regulated by legislation and
relates to all enterprises in the countries concerned,” said Xenia
Scheil-Adlung, Health Policy Coordinator in the Social Protection
Department of the International Labor Organization in Geneva,
Switzerland.
Paid sick leave should be available to all workers as part of decent
working conditions, Scheil-Adlung told Reuters Health by email.
“Financial protection in case of sickness includes both coverage of
health care costs and income replacement,” she said.
And given the higher productivity of healthy workers, paid sick
leave has a return on investment for employers, Scheil-Adlung said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1OvHxkv Health Affairs, online March 7, 2016.
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