Spread the Love
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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One of my teachers read a letter to the class that he had received from the LBCC administration. It said that due to risk of H1N1, we should all stay home if we felt even the slightest bit sick.
Moments later, he read us a second letter from the administration saying that all teachers needed to be ruthless about attendance due to increased enrollment.
Similarly, my boss says that since we deal with sick and old people regularly, and by being sick endanger their lives, we should stay home. However, when I called in with a horrible cold, he told me that he “needs reliable people” and that being sick for a third time in 3 months didn’t make me look good. He casually tossed out the phrase “grounds for termination” a couple of times, and I pointed out I had only gotten sick twice within the past few weeks, a time where we’ve been swamped with sick people clammering for cold and flu medication.He had nothing to say to that except that he’d keep my absence in mind in the future.
In the end, I went to work and dealt with lots of elderly people, feeling like a hot coal had been dropped down my throat, unable to breath, my nose running like a fire hydrant, slightly nauseous and coughing and sneezing every few seconds.
God bless America.
According to the Washington Post, the US falls drastically behind the rest of the developed world in terms of giving people sick days. The article said that almost half of privately owned companies don’t offer any paid sick days. The United States and Australia are the only industrialized countries that do not guarantee new mothers paid maternity leave. At least Australia guarantees a few months of sick leave. We don’t offer either, putting us on par with Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. 139 other countries offer paid sick leave.
Citing a few examples from another study by USA Today: Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore apparently has no mercy for the sick on its own payroll. You only get 9 sick days a year before you are fired. These are people who work in hugely stressful situations, which lower your immune system, and are around sick and contagious people all day. Starmark International in Ft. Lauderdale only offers 4 sick days a year before you get canned. Considering that JobBank USA says the average full time employee is sick 8.4 days a year, that’s a lot of productive workers fired due to a fault in their immune system.
Did it ever occur to the people who make the rules, ideological descendants of the Puritans, that by forcing us to interact with dozens (or in me and my coworkers’ cases, hundreds) of people, we are working to spread the diseases and illnesses that they are so afraid of? If you are so concerned that your operation may be crippled by a rampaging epidemic, how about not demanding that everyone shows up unless they’re dying? Say, maybe if you don’t force sick people to congregate, there will be fewer epidemics to worry about? Just a thought.
Photo courtesy of donnagrayson @ Flickr
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