Paid Sick Leave Policies and Precarious Work in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light the critical importance of Paid Sick Leave (PSL) in helping to stop the spread of disease and in supporting workers needing to take leave for illness or to quarantine. At the same time, the pandemic underscored the limited and unequal access to PSL in the US. Prior to the pandemic, 91% of management and professional workers had access to PSL, compared to just 61% of service workers. While the pandemic ushered in both voluntary and mandated PSL expansions, access to PSL has remained uneven.   

In this panel, we bring together three papers that explore PSL in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, each focusing on workers in precarious and in-person jobs. These papers situate PSL within the context of other employer policies, state public health interventions, and illness rates to understand workers experiences and behaviors during the pandemic.     

Loustaunau examines the contradictions between expanded access to Paid Sick Leave (PSL) during specific phases of the COVID-19 pandemic and the persistence of punitive employer policies, compounded by "essential worker" incentives that rewarded presenteeism. Through the experiences of food processing workers in Oregon and Washington, the paper reveals how these conflicting policies created significant barriers for workers attempting to utilize expanded PSL provisions. It also highlights how the temporary nature of many pandemic-era protections, combined with the prolonged duration of the crisis, exacerbated challenges for workers in hard-hit industries like food processing. It is based on in-depth interviews with workers across more than 20 food processing companies conducted between 2020 and 2021. 

Goodman, Schneider, and Harknett use repeated cross-sectional data to examine trends in working while sick in a sample of service sector workers before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. They uncover novel evidence that rates of working while sick sharply declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, before returning to near pre-pandemic levels by early 2023.  Decomposing the source of these changes, they find little evidence that access to paid sick leave explained the reduction in working while sick.  Instead, the evidence is more consistent with lower rates of illness during the pandemic and with short-term change in presenteeism norms that led to workers being more likely to stay home when sick.

Slopen, Ballentine, Harknett, and Schneider examine the interaction of state PSL policies and corporate attendance policies (or “points systems”) in shaping front-line retail and food service workers’ ability to stay home while sick. Such points systems may punish workers for using legally protected time off, resulting in presenteeism, however there is little data on these practices. Deploying novel individual-level measurement of exposure to points systems merged with state-level PSL coverage, they estimate that workers exposed to corporate points systems are significantly more likely to report working while sick. Further, points systems are no less common in states with PSL standards and workers exposed to points systems are just as likely to work sick in PSL states as in non-covered states, suggesting that corporate policy significantly constrained the effectiveness of public policy.

Policy Area

• Poverty and Income Policy

Secondary Policy Area

• Health Policy

Chair

• Kristen Harknett, University of California, San Francisco

Discussants

• Heather D Hill, University of Washington

• Anjum Hajat, University of Washington

Organizer

• Julia M. Goodman, OHSU/Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences

Individual Presentations

• Trends in Working While Sick in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic - Presenting Author: Julia M. Goodman, OHSU/Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Daniel Schneider, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Kristen Harknett, University of California, San Francisco

• Paid Sick Leave, Points, and Presenteeism: The Challenge of Punitive Workplace Policies for Public Health Goals - Presenting Author: Kess Ballentine, Wayne State University

• Between Rights and Retaliation: Precarious Migrant Workers, Paid Sick Leave, and the COVID-19 Pandemic - Presenting Author: Lola Loustaunau, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Investigating the Welfare-to-Work Requirements and Sanction-Lifted Policies Following the COVID-19 Pandemic through an Equity Lens - Presenting Author: Yu-Ling Chang, University of California, Berkeley