A few years ago, when Gabe Christenson began to feel ill, he did not visit the doctor.
The 45-year-old train worker, like almost 30 million other Americans, did not have paid sick leave and feared being punished for taking time off.
According to Gabe, his company’s attendance policy penalized employees for any time away. “Therefore, I avoided going,” he stated.
When he eventually made an appointment, the physician diagnosed him with a stomach infection. Gabe was informed that some of his tissues would need to be removed because the condition could have been managed with medicine if it had been detected earlier.
In recent weeks, rail workers like Gabe’s demands for paid sick leave brought the United States to the verge of its first national rail strike in 30 years.
President Joe Biden and Congress prevented the strike by intervening and compelling rail workers to accept the terms of a new contract.
It included a pay increase, an extra personal day, and a few other benefits, but no paid sick leave.
Thousands of workers who had hoped for greater support from a political party and a president who campaigned on the promise of establishing national sick leave and supporting unions are angered by the outcome.
It’s a slap in the face,” said Gabe, a registered Democrat who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and a member of Railroad Workers United, an informal group that expressed concerns about the matter. “People fear losing their jobs…We require protection.”
“Here Biden is supposed to be this wonderful pro-labor president and Amtrak Joe and all that,” he remarked, referring to the president’s affection for riding the national passenger rail system.
People are depressed because this has occurred so frequently.
The United States is one of just two nations in the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that does not guarantee paid sick leave for its employees. (South Korea is now testing a paid sick leave program.)
Even though 16 states have approved legislation mandating paid sick leave in the past decade, one in five workers in the United States still do not have access to this benefit, with low-wage workers being especially at risk.
In recent years, the problem has periodically surfaced in labor conflicts as workers, empowered by a robust job market and confronting coronavirus and an especially harsh flu and virus season, demand more from their employers.
In 2020, Erica, a single mother of three, resigned from her position as a pediatric nurse in a Tennessee emergency department to work for a rival hospital that offered paid sick leave in addition to additional time off.
It astonished me that they wanted us to utilize our paid time off and that we would be off for 10 or 14 days,” said the 38-year-old community advocate for A Better Balance, an advocacy group, about the lengthy quarantines that were customary during the outbreak’s onset.
Due to the lack of paid sick leave, she was unable to take a vacation and was forced to use unpaid days to care for her kid, putting a strain on her finances.
Jennifer Pomeranz, a professor of public health at New York University who has studied the problem, stated, “It is unquestionably an area where we need government protections.” “You should not lose paid sick leave because you live in a state that is more pro-business than another one.
During the pandemic, it appeared for a time that a national policy may develop.
In 2020, Congress established a temporary law mandating that the majority of employers provide two weeks of paid sick leave to employees quarantined due to Covid-19.
However, this expired at the end of the year, and businesses swiftly reduced benefits.
Despite efforts to resuscitate the subject, many Republicans disliked the principle of government-issued “business mandates,” and discussions ceased.
North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, a Republican, stated in May 2021, during the issue’s final major public hearing, that “we need to remember that we’re not very effective at running businesses from Washington.”
While he acknowledged that employees should be able to take sick leave, he stated that “the one-size-fits-all approach does not work on challenges, particularly on paid leave.”
Sherry Leiwant, co-founder of A Better Balance, who has worked on paid sick leave campaigns since the early 2000s, referred to the decision not to extend the benefit in 2020 as “the most upsetting event in my work on this topic.”
“That was heartbreaking,” she added, adding that a national law now appears “impossible.”
“It was stunning that we couldn’t include paid sick days as a necessity in our Covid assistance package at a time when we were celebrating all these front-line workers who were keeping the economy afloat at the expense of their health.”
Erik Loomis, a professor of labor history at the University of Rhode Island, asserts that the Biden administration made a mistake by not taking the problem more seriously earlier this year when it attempted to broker a compromise between unions and railways.
However, he stated that no president, regardless of how labor-friendly, would risk an economically destructive strike over sick pay.
“At this time, paid sick leave at the national level is not even a topic of discussion,” he said, adding that the rail deal is otherwise “excellent for workers.”
Theoretically, a circumstance like this could inspire a conversation, but I doubt it.
The National Railway Labor Conference, which represents freight rail companies in labor discussions, stated that rail workers had enough personal and holiday leave, which can be used in the event of illness, as well as the option to take unpaid time off.
They refuted assertions by employees that supervisors are rejecting such requests more frequently as staffing levels decline.
Gabe, a railroad employee since 2004, stated that the firms could afford the benefit, citing their record revenues in recent years.
“Nobody out here will say they don’t want to work; we’re all here to make money. We are aware that we are on call 24/7, but you used to be able to take time off “he stated. Now they’re squeezing us so tight it’s like drawing blood from a pumpkin.
They could grant me 300 days of personal leave, but what would they be worth if I couldn’t use them?
