Economists and public health experts alike say paid sick leave is an essential tool—like testing, masks and vaccines —in the effort to prevent COVID-19 infection and keep workplaces safe.
Yet the U.S. is entering another COVID holiday season, and federal laws that offered COVID-related paid sick leave to workers have expired. Colorado, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh are among a small number of places that have put in place their own COVID protections, but many sick workers across the country must wrestle with difficult financial and ethical questions when deciding whether to stay home.
“Millions of workers don't have access to paid sick leave, and we’re still in a pandemic,” said Nicolas Ziebarth, a labor economist at Cornell University.
The U.S. is one of only a few industrialized nations that has no national paid sick leave policy. By contrast, Germany, Ziebarth’s homeland, has had one for nearly 140 years.
The coronavirus pandemic led to short-term change. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act mandated paid sick leave nationally, a first in U.S. history, according to Ziebarth. The law included about two weeks of full pay for employees who were quarantined or seeking medical attention for COVID-like symptoms and additional weeks at partial pay to care for a child stuck at home because of COVID.
But the paid sick leave mandate consistently applied only to employers with 50 to 499 employees and lasted just nine months, expiring at the end of 2020. After that, employers...
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