The federal government and some employers have tried to cope with the pandemic’s fallout by expanding employee access to needed sick leave. But whether these efforts made a difference — especially for those working from home — is still a bit of a mystery.
Employees have juggled their work responsibilities and illness in very different ways during the past 20 months than they did before the pandemic arrived, experts say. For those working from home, the calculus behind taking sick time may have changed a lot.
Researchers will be reflecting on two important, but very different questions about sick leave and COVID-19 in the months and years ahead:
Axios recently explored what’s probably a fairly common scenario for remote workers: continuing to work even while sick.
“Before the pandemic, if you woke up with a runny nose or a tickle in your throat, it was a simple enough decision to stay home and avoid infecting your co-workers. Now, as more Americans work from home, sick days are disappearing,” the article noted.
Sick days aren’t literally disappearing, of course, but workers may be finding it harder to justify taking time off to be ill, if only to themselves. Axios reported that such behavior “leads to an epidemic of ‘presenteeism’ — showing up for work when...
Every couple of years, the same false stories come back. A claim that an election was rigged before a single vote was cast. An old video of violence, stripped of its date and place, presented as b...