Lawmakers Propose Emergency Legislation for Paid Sick Days
SICK DAYS
New London Day
Jeanne Amy
Boston University Washington News Service
11/10/09
WASHINGTON—Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said Tuesday that he will introduce emergency legislation to provide paid sick days to workers who miss work because they or their family members have H1N1 or seasonal flu.
The legislation, to go into affect 15 days after being signed into law, would allow for seven paid sick days to be used at the employee’s discretion. It would apply only to businesses with 15 or more employees.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, said at a hearing by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee on Children and Families, which Dodd chairs, that she has been working to obtain paid sick leave for the past five years. In May, she reintroduced the Healthy Families Act, which would require employers to provide such leave. Dodd co-sponsored an identical bill in the Senate in May.
“We work in the public sector, we go to the head of the line when we’re ill and probably when our families are ill,” DeLauro said of members of Congress. “We can take as much time as we want and there’s no one saying that your job isn’t going to be there, your salary isn’t going to be there or you can’t do it.”
DeLauro said that she hoped the Healthy Families Act would become law to “let us have a national policy that meets the needs of working families today” for the estimated 57 million American workers who do not have paid sick leave.
Dodd said of his narrower bill that the H1N1 flu pandemic poses new threats to the work force.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that a person with H1N1 flu will, on average, infect 10 percent of his or her co-workers. An official of the agency testified at the hearing that an infected worker may need to stay home for three to five days.
Desiree Rosado of Groton said she personally understands the need for paid sick days. Rosado, a mother of three young children, testified that when all three contracted flu this fall, she had to take two weeks off from her job as a special-education assistant for theGroton public schools to care for them.
“It is a hard road, and it’s made a lot harder because whenever we get sick or when our children get sick we have to decide whether to stay home without pay or to disregard doctor’s orders and risk getting sicker and infecting others by going to work or school,” Rosado said.
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