Nearly two dozen states had established legislation that forbade local governments from requiring paid sick leave prior to the epidemic; this situation may be causing an increase in worker mortality, suggests a recent research.
An investigation by Syracuse University, which was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that the mortality rate of working-age Americans increased 6% between 2010 and 2017, despite the fact that the death rates for babies and persons over 65 decreased during same time.
The only affluent country without a federal legislation ensuring paid sick days for employees is the United States, leaving it up to individual states, local governments, and companies to decide. During the COVID-19 epidemic, when millions of employees were forced to choose between their health and their earnings, this absence of paid sick leave became a problem.
The researchers found that four counties—Orange County in Florida, Bexar, Dallas, and Travis counties in Texas—tried to enact paid sick leave legislation but were unsuccessful because their states forbade local governments from establishing laws protecting workers.
The researchers found that if big cities could require 40 hours of paid time off each year for sickness, worker death rates in states where local governments are prohibited from enacting paid sick-leave legislation might be cut by more than 5%.
Working-age Americans’ lives may be becoming shorter due to state preemption laws that prioritize corporations above people, according to study co-author Jennifer Karas Montez of Syracuse University.
She continued by saying that the extent of the effect on mortality in places where paid sick leave legislation are prohibited by local governments “surprised” the researchers.
Legislation Requiring Paid Sick Days
14 states and the District of Columbia require employers to provide paid sick days to employees, who typically accumulate the paid time off depending on the amount of hours they work. For instance, California law mandates that every 30 hours of labor be followed by one hour of paid sick leave.
According to a 2020 research by the Urban Institute, 23 states had established laws prohibiting local governments from requiring companies to provide paid sick time before the pandemic, even though five of those states had paid sick-leave legislation on a statewide level.
Accordingly, many jurisdictions do not provide its citizens the right to paid sick leave, which means they may only take advantage of it if their employer choose to do so. According to the human resources website SHRM, states from Alabama to Wyoming lack legislation requiring paid sick leave.
According to studies from Syracuse University, each hour of required paid sick time reduces mortality from suicide and murder for males and alcohol-related fatalities for women by a substantial amount.
According to the researchers, workers who are unable to get paid sick leave and who need to take time off to recuperate from illnesses are more likely to experience financial difficulty and job loss, which raises the risk of drug use and suicide.
The lack of a paid sick leave requirement, they concluded, “has led to alarming growing death rates among working-age persons even before the COVID-19 epidemic.”