An estimated 42 percent of North Carolinians work jobs that offer no paid sick leave; prompting sick people to interact in stores, hotels, restaurants, schools and child care facilities. A group of advocacy organizations plan to reintroduce legislation this year that would make paid sick leave mandatory for more employers.
Do you get sick leave at your job? Should employers have to give employees paid sick leave?
As an HR Manager, I am employed by a company that does not offer sick leave to their employees. Upon entering this company, the new employee is entitled to 2 weeks vacation a year. If an employee gets sick, he is forced to use one of the vacation days as sick leave. I am trying to change this. Why?
No sick leave benefits has employees coming into work sick, subjecting healthy employees to their illness and spreading germs. You can bet that there will be other getting sick because one employee was not allowed to take sick leave. No one will take a vacation day as "sick leave" in this company, which creates more problems than just one person out on sick leave.
The contagion spreads, you have 4-5 people out sick now and production is down, over-time for the healthy has sky-rocketed and now the boss is screaming about overtime.
Give at least a week's sick leave so that the ONE sick person can stay home and keep their germs to themselves.
It's just simple logic.
What exactly does it mean to say "42 percent of North Carolinians work jobs that offer no paid sick leave"? Pretty much every job I've ever had lumped sick leave and vacation into a single bucket called "Paid Time Off". I had three weeks of PTO instead of two weeks vacation and five days of sick leave, but technically I was using "PTO", not sick leave, on days I was sick. Does that count as a job that "offers no paid sick leave" for this statistic?
Or what about the person with a job that has sick leave, but he also works a part-time job every Christmas that offers no sick leave, do I count as a North Carolilna who works a job that offers no paid sick leave?
And, of course, what percentage of North Carolinians are self-employed? By any measure they would work jobs with no sick leave, but that's hardly the same thing as being an employee of a company that doesn't offer its employees sick leave.
The implication behind this statistic is that 42% of full-time employees in North Carolina are forced by their full-time employer to either work sick or not get paid. I seriously doubt that's the case, and wonder just how much lower the figure is when worded that way.
Sick Leave
Small business owners are faced with enough issues without having to also pay for sick time. Employees would take advantage of the situation and cause more undue hardship on the business owner. Employers and employees who show dedication and commitment always are able to work something out. In the perfect world it would be great to offer a benefit such as sick leave to everyone, but when margins are very tight, there is no room for the extra pay to the "sick employee" and the others who may go into overtime to cover that person.