Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

02 March 2020

Covid-19: A Blessing for Labor in Disguise?


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

One of the most glaring anomalies of the present-day US is how many workers believe they have it better than their foreign counterparts just by being Americans. The facts are mostly to the contrary.

Most foreign developed nations have better policies for workers’ sick leave and family leave (including child-bearing and bereavement leave) than we do. In Sweden, for example, the mother and the father of a newborn get a total of 480 days of leave, with benefits paid for by the government. That allows both parents to bond with and care for the newborn during the early, critical stages of its new life, without worrying about their income.

One big reason for this difference is that uniform national laws govern family and sick leave in many foreign nations. Not in the US. Here, “free enterprise” is sacrosanct, and government “interference” with it is disfavored, to put it mildly. So what leave employees have, let alone whether it’s paid, depends on their employers’ largesse and their own bargaining power. With union membership now at a seven-decade low, good luck with that!

But relief for workers and their families may be coming soon, in the form of a pandemic disease called Covid-19. Here’s how the process could work. It all starts with customers, especially the geezers who, according to the epidemiologists, are most likely to die from the disease.

Say the epidemic hits your neighborhood, not too hard, but not too lightly, either. There are two restaurants within walking distance of your home. One has a policy of encouraging workers to self-quarantine if they feel sick, if informed they’ve been exposed, or if they work closely with workers who feel sick or have been exposed. It promises to pay its workers for self-quarantining, and it advertises this policy in the local newspapers and on notices on its front door. The other restaurant does nothing of the kind. Which restaurant are you going to patronize when the epidemic hits your town?

We don’t yet know how long the virus that causes Covid-19 remains active and dangerous on goods. So a similar phenomenon will attend retail sales. Customers will be more eager to buy stuff at a place whose employees are encouraged to self-quarantine, where they don’t fear that the stuff they buy may have been sneezed on.

Once this reaction becomes clear, the issue will move into to the realm of politics. Retail establishments of all stripes will demand laws requiring fair and equitable treatment of self-quarantining employees.

Why? Because if every business has to pay for self-quarantining, no one will be at a disadvantage. All can raise their prices without worrying, knowing that the playing field will be level. The public will have to pay for the common-sense public-health measures, but everyone will be safer.

Patrons might have to go out to lunch and dinner less often, but they’ll feel and be safer when they do. Everyone will gain, and the community will do the right thing under fair and equitable rules. If the equitable laws are only local, the epidemic there will be shorter and less serious than in other places.

The demand for a level playing field will extend to online sellers like Amazon, too. Who wants to order a product for delivery worrying that a warehouse employee with Covid-19 might have sneezed on it?

All this ought to have happened years ago, after the SARS and MERS epidemics. But we have a society whose moral lodestar is profit.

It’s never too late to do the right thing. Now Covid-19 gives us all the chance to reconsider what’s really important in life, what we owe to our fellow human beings and our communities, including employees and customers. Unions and workers would be wise to jump on this “moral reawakening” posthaste.

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