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Obama Just Guaranteed Sick Days For More Than A Million Workers

ReverendHellh0und said:
Why would one need to roll over banked sick days?

I thought they were for sickness...
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I am really interested to know why the DC ELITE decided to get this far into the minutia, why they made rollover part of the law. In reality almost no one will do this, not least becase of fears that the contractor will go bankrupt, a common scam of government contractors.
 
polgara said:
Greetings, Hawkeye10. :2wave:

:agree: People working in the business world get sick, too, but unless it's a heart attack or something equally serious, most companies do not usually hire additional workers - the people already there split up the work and handle it along with their own. I highly doubt any government employee is overworked, either. Being a Government Contract Worker must be a very lucrative way to earn money - too bad private businesses can't use taxpayer money, too, so it just seems like another way to hide from the taxpayer how his hard-earned money is really being spent! :thumbdown:
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Hi polgara!

That is one of the major problems in offices, when people are ill frequently. That is the most pressing reason to let people go that are out sick often. In large departments you even have to build in extra personnel, which is expensive and reduces the amount you can pay the rest of the people.
 
joG said:
Oh yes. It increases the costs of economic activity. While I have always been extremely careful to send people home that have contagious illness or risk making mistakes, making it to general law will disadvantage the country. If you look up the number of days taken in sick leave and do the maths, you might understand better. The German numbers were easiest to pull:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/Indikatoren/QualitaetArbeit/Dimension2/2_3_Krankenstand.html

It is always the same. When you increase costs, you will at the same time tend to reduce pay, total wage sum or number of jobs in the economy. It is really very basic economics.
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Well, could be true. I don't read German so couldn't interpret your link, but it's still a better option to reduce pay a small amount then allow employees paid time off. Their budgets will be in sync with that pay and the time off less of or not a sometimes big financial burden on top of the already often big financial burden of paying for getting treated for the illness. People without sick pay are generally those at the lowest rungs already who can least afford a week or two unpaid at work - it could literally mean missed rent, etc. that spirals from there.

Besides, not everything can be reduced to dollars. We'd be better off as far as pay/jobs/productivity/competitiveness goes using your analysis if we just let the poor die when they get sick and not having Medicaid etc. We'd also be a very ****ty place to live and a crap country for treating those on the low economic rungs like they were no more important than livestock.
 
gdgyva said:
and you all wonder why wages are stagnant

:lamo
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Wages sure aren't stagnant for decades due to a requirement that has yet to go in effect, and only for employees working on federal contracts, that's for sure... :lamo

:roll:
 
JasperL said:
No one ever gets sick more than 7 days in a year? :doh
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So why not make sick days perpetual? why if I work for a company for 5 years, someone who's worked there for 10 can take more sick days than me?


Will my sickness not be as bad as theres because I haven't banked enough days?


Odd logic here.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I am really interested to know why the DC ELITE decided to get this far into the minutia, why they made rollover part of the law. In reality almost no one will do this, not least becase of fears that the contractor will go bankrupt, a common scam of government contractors.
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Like Solyndra who barely had a guaranteed government check in hand before they filed for bankruptcy? I wondered at the time why it became the taxpayers' responsibility to pay the money back, since most of us didn't even know about the deal, let alone agree to it!
 
JasperL said:
It's not a requirement that has yet to go in effect, and only for employees working on federal contracts, that's for sure... :lamo

:roll:
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the president, with a stroke of his pen, is putting requirements on businesses to pay sick leave

they are working on making maternity leave payable

we already have the new ACA...and the extra costs from that

most people dont consider benefits when discussing wages....but it is a HUGE cost, and getting higher

as insurance costs have skyrocketed, the employers have seen their expenses jump with them

this just adds to those straws already on the camel's back.....
 
joG said:
I know the arguments and they resemble those made for minimum wages and other social give aways of other people's money to garner votes. If you want private goods for people convince the beneficiary to pay or the voter.
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That's not an argument against paid sick leave or a response to the points raised in the articles.

But the costs might not be crippling, only non negligible
https://de.statista.com/themen/33/krankheit-und-beruf/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/537403/sweden-expenditure-on-sickness-benefits/
and cause marginal increases in the costs translate into marginal shifts to fewer jobs.
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Couldn't read your first link and am missing what in the second demonstrates a relevant point. Can you quote the cites and tell us what you're looking at.

But you are quite wrong that there is no misuse as the numbers I posted you indicate. When unemployment goes up labor is ill less. There has been quite a bit of research done, but here a little of the flavor How to Address Sick Leave Abuse in the Workplace
Personally I never worked anywhere I needed to justify taking sick leave nor did I take much. Over the years we did let some people go that were recurrently sick. There was no way to find out whether they were cheating, because that would have jeapordised the process of making them redundant and made it much more expensive.

There is no free lunch for the individual nor is there for the economy.
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I think the arguments are more that sick leave is the right thing to do than the policy is a 'free lunch.'
 
gdgyva said:
the president, with a stroke of his pen, is putting requirements on businesses to pay sick leave

they are working on making maternity leave payable

we already have the new ACA...and the extra costs from that

most people dont consider benefits when discussing wages....but it is a HUGE cost, and getting higher

as insurance costs have skyrocketed, the employers have seen their expenses jump with them

this just adds to those straws already on the camel's back.....
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The man is a socialist meglamaniac with a Jean-Luc Picard 'Make it so!' obsession.
 
polgara said:
Like Solyndra who barely had a guaranteed government check in hand before they filed for bankruptcy? I wondered at the time why it became the taxpayers' responsibility to pay the money back, since most of us didn't even know about the deal, let alone agree to it!
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Sort of, it was well known for well over a decade that paining companies would lowball bids to get the contract, run the company for a couple of years loading it up with debt, make it bankrupt, form a new company, and lowball the next round of bids. The people awarding the contracts knew exactly what these people were doing but they were getting low bids so they did nothing about it. Around 2006 I heard about one particular guy at Ft Lewis who was then on his 5th painting company, still getting government work. I have a fogy memory of sometime after that the Pentagon putting in place new contracting rules to try to stop that, I have no idea how well it worked but like hackers people who are out to do gain income by way of fraud tend to stay one step ahead of the ones who are trying(often not very hard, just look at YAHOO. Or Target) to stop them.

EDIT: I did not word the end here very well at all, but I am too busy to fix it, hopefully my point was clear.
 
JasperL said:
That's not an argument against paid sick leave or a response to the points raised in the articles.



Couldn't read your first link and am missing what in the second demonstrates a relevant point. Can you quote the cites and tell us what you're looking at.



I think the arguments are more that sick leave is the right thing to do than the policy is a 'free lunch.'
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right thing to do for who?

not the owner of the business...all this is doing is taking money out of his pocket

since when is it the governments role to mandate benefits at one job or another?

if you dont like what you have at place "a", then i suggest you go to place "b"

that is what the free market allows...you arent tied to your employer, nor he to you

this is just WRONG
 
gdgyva said:
the president, with a stroke of his pen, is putting requirements on businesses to pay sick leave

they are working on making maternity leave payable

we already have the new ACA...and the extra costs from that

most people dont consider benefits when discussing wages....but it is a HUGE cost, and getting higher

as insurance costs have skyrocketed, the employers have seen their expenses jump with them

this just adds to those straws already on the camel's back.....
Click to expand...

Yes, I've seen plenty of studies indicating that wage increases are being partially or fully offset by increases in benefits, especially health care benefits, but all that means is mostly healthcare inflation is outstripping wage gains, so isn't that compelling of an argument to me.

And you just can't point to benefits as the main driver of decades of stagnant wages. The decline in private sector unions, and globalization are surely far more impactful on wages especially for those affected by ACA and mandated benefits, who are those on the bottom rungs. Millions of decent blue collar jobs have gone poof, replaced by low wage, low value added service jobs with no benefits or low benefits.
 
gdgyva said:
right thing to do for who?

not the owner of the business...all this is doing is taking money out of his pocket
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You're asserting that but that certainly isn't a given. I fully recognize if you mandate $500 in benefits that it's an increase in compensation and there are three option - profits go down, hourly pay or salary goes down, and/or prices go up. And what I pointed out in another response is even if the whole amount is reflected in lower wages over a transition period, fine, that's a better solution than forcing employees to work while sick OR pay their bills, which actually IS the option for a lot of people, because their living standards will adjust to the slightly lower nominal pay.

since when is it the governments role to mandate benefits at one job or another?
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Are you a libertarian? The government has been mandating working conditions for many decades now. Benefits is one of them.

if you dont like what you have at place "a", then i suggest you go to place "b"

that is what the free market allows...you arent tied to your employer, nor he to you

this is just WRONG
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Works for me but not for people who are actually affected by these changes or who need them. I don't see sick pay, or maternity leave and medical insurance for that matter, as anything but sort of a pretty low floor for workers in America. If employers don't cover those things, they'll eventually be paid by taxpayers and IMO it's a question whether we should effectively subsidize low wage labor in this country with medicaid, maternity leave, etc. paid for with taxes, or shift those costs to employers who benefit from the labor, matching the FULL costs of labor with the entity getting the benefits. I'm not sure what the answer is.

What I don't think is reasonable is to assume that workers will forever bear those costs especially those on the bottom who are already decades into stagnation or actual decline of their living standards. We'll eventually get a Bernie in the WH and Congress full of them who will make changes far more harmful to employers' profits than these modest measures, IMO.
 
joG said:
The man is a socialist meglamaniac with a Jean-Luc Picard 'Make it so!' obsession.
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Dictating contract terms for people getting paid by the government makes Obama a "socialist"...... Got it! How about the companies getting government contracts - also socialists? Would seem to me privatizing the means of production by hiring private companies to do government projects isn't actually how a real socialist operates, but I could be wrong. :doh
 
Mason66 said:
Paying people for not working. I just don't get it.
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Healthy people are better employees? That would be my guess, but don't take my word for it.
 
gdgyva said:
the president, with a stroke of his pen, is putting requirements on businesses to pay sick leave

they are working on making maternity leave payable

we already have the new ACA...and the extra costs from that

most people dont consider benefits when discussing wages....but it is a HUGE cost, and getting higher

as insurance costs have skyrocketed, the employers have seen their expenses jump with them

this just adds to those straws already on the camel's back.....
Click to expand...

Greetings, gdgyva. :2wave:

You may have just answered a question many people haven't yet received an answer to when they ask "Why is our debt now at $21 million dollars and still climbing, and what did we get for the money we now owe?"

Our infrastructure continues to deteriorate due to lack of money; more and more people are losing jobs because the companies they work for are leaving the US due to government regulations; and one in seven people in this Country are on food stamps just to survive. When in H*** did we become so bad off that we don't even rank in the top twenty in terms of wealthy countries now?

Those straws you refer to seem to have become lead beams on that poor camel's back, and will likely cause it to collapse at some point. :thumbdown:
 
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ReverendHellh0und said:
So why not make sick days perpetual? why if I work for a company for 5 years, someone who's worked there for 10 can take more sick days than me?
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Well assuming that neither of you has taken any sick days over those years, yes, because that person who has worked there for ten years has EARNED more sick days than you have, first by working and earning so many hours per month of sick time, then by not taking time off all those years. Not sure what the problem is. Seriously.

The alternative to banking them is a 'use it or lose it' system, which is really an incentive for employees to game the system and call in after a drunk night out or just to enjoy nice weather like we have here today.

Will my sickness not be as bad as theres because I haven't banked enough days?

Odd logic here.
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My explanation wasn't complete. The point to me of having sick days is to allow employees to use them when they really ARE sick. I went most years when I worked as an employee taking VERY few if any sick days. But I earned a bunch of days that I banked, and if I was ever seriously ill, they'd be there to cushion the blow of missing a few weeks work for something serious. It's no different to me than an insurance contract you EARN additions to every year as you work and, this is key, DO NOT TAKE SICK DAYS OFF. So banking rewards those who do NOT abuse the system. It's probably why every employer I've worked for allowed for banking them. It's always made perfect sense to me.
 
polgara said:
Greetings, gdgyva. :2wave:

You may have just answered a question many people haven't yet received an answer to when they ask "Why is our debt now at $21 million dollars and still climbing, and what did we get for the money we now owe?"

Our infrastructure continues to deteriorate due to lack of money; more and more people are losing jobs because the companies they work for are leaving the US due to government regulations; and one in seven people in this Country are on food stamps just to survive. When in H*** did we become so bad off that we don't even rank in the top twenty in terms of wealthy countries now?

Those straws you refer to seem to have become lead beams on that poor camel's back, and will likely cause it to collapse at some point. :thumbdown:
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That's at least incomplete. Pull up a picture of China and see what kind of air pollution they put up with - the dirty air kills an estimated hundreds of thousands a year in China - and water pollution and the unsafe working conditions, subsistence living (women living in dorms, 20-40 to a room) for full time workers, etc. Yes, regulations will not allow us to do that to our air, water, etc. but we cannot accept those conditions anymore. And in a lot of cases our workers are competing against that and 25 cents or 1.35 or whatever per hour.

So in my view the huge straw made of lead is our workers are now competing against that, and it's hard to do in an advanced economy that simply will NOT tolerate those kinds of living conditions or working conditions.

I'm sure there are a ton of 'regulations' we should get rid of and streamline business in this country, but an awful lot of them won't ever go away and should not go away, and it's unclear to me what regulations we can get rid of that would have a big impact on competitiveness, but that wouldn't allow air pollution like we see in China or our air trending to that at any rate. Trump promises to get rid of lots of them, but we hear that all the time from conservatives and haven't seen much action over the years, so I'm skeptical.
 
Obama Just Guaranteed Sick Days For More Than A Million Workers
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possibly. it's going to take labor organization to make sure that it happens on a larger scale, though.
 
Actually...its unlikely this will have much impact on the fed or employers.

Paid sick leave is a benefit many employers provide. They can have their own rules in place to ensure they are abused. Its unlikely that they would have to hire someone extra to cover slack. Its probably a good idea. Heres the problem. Obama cant pass legislation...he can only sign EOs. His EOs expire the moment he leaves office, so beginning Jan 2017 this MAY or MAY not still be in effect. IF it passes a constitutional challenge (should one be brought).
 
gdgyva said:
right thing to do for who?

not the owner of the business...all this is doing is taking money out of his pocket

since when is it the governments role to mandate benefits at one job or another?

if you dont like what you have at place "a", then i suggest you go to place "b"

that is what the free market allows...you arent tied to your employer, nor he to you

this is just WRONG
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[emphasis added by bubba]

incorrect. the worst impact on the business owner is that the contract will remain revenue neutral
this is a unilateral modification to the contract resulting from the government's executive order
the government will automatically have to pay at least as much to the business as the contractor will incur in sick leave compliance costs
and if the contractor is performing a cost plus contract, this will add to the base amount which will then elevate the basis used to determine profit due to the contractor
 
ludin said:
Sick leave just like vacation is a benefit it is not owed to you.
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If it is earned it is. Federal employees earn sick leave and vacation.
 
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