SICK LEAVE: Businesses would adapt to absences
RICHARD G. LILLIE; Tacoma
Re: “Families: Mandates create barriers to employment” (letters, 4-4).
There are two logical fallacies to the business view of mandated sick leave; one involves public health, and one is a simple failure to recognize an undistributed middle term.
Everyone has seen the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s estimate that there are 76 million people sickened by foodborne illness annually in the United States, of which 300,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die. One may argue with the methodology, but let us suppose that those numbers are accurate. Given the statistics on bacterial foodborne infections that can be secondarily acquired (and E. coli H7O157 is one) and viral foodborne pathogens like Norovirus, mandated sick leave in the restaurant industry would probably reduce foodborne illnesses by half annually. My own children and grandchildren have been sickened by minimum-wage restaurant workers who could not afford to miss a day’s work so they came to work ill (and infectious).
Now for the undistributed middle term; what the letter writer neglects to admit is that mandated sick leave would affect all companies, so there would be no differential effect. I have lived many years in Europe and Asia and, strange to tell, the fast food companies that testify before Congress that mandating benefits would destroy their business model do exactly that in Europe and Asia because the law compels them to do so. (Richard Lillie works for the Washington Department of Health.)
