Paid sick leave

According to the brilliant analysts at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, sixty-six million workers, or 54% of the workforce, does not get a single paid sick day after a full year on the job.

That statistic, I think, is one of the best indicators of the two classes of the labor market, and how the divide is not so much about wages and income as about benefits and security. And those of us on the relatively secure side of the divide cannot really understand how different life is in a world where you don't have any paid sick leave. I might think I understand what it is to earn low wages -- $10,500/year, in my first job -- but I've never had a job that didn't offer sick days. Can't even imagine it.

(I did work at a company once that had a clever policy: You could take as many sick days as you needed, but at the end of the year, if you had significantly more days than the average for the company as a whole, you had to talk about it with your supervisor, and perhaps there were some steps after that. That seemed fair, and it discouraged you from thinking of sick days as a use-it-or-lose-it allotment, like personal days.)

IWPR mostly talks about the lack of paid sick leave as a matter of income, health, and productivity, arguing in support of legislation to require paid sick leave. That argument is compelling, but I'd like to know something else about this number: How many of these 66 million are actually at significant risk of losing their jobs if they take one or more sick days?

Jacob Hacker has a sort of preview of his next book in The New Republic, and I think he is most clearly saying the big thing that needs to be said about the economy: That the principal problem, the big thing that has changed, is not the number of jobs, the rate of growth, or income inequality. It's the shift in risk from the government and corporations onto individuals. We are all experiencing this risk-shifting -- our savings are in stocks and mutual funds, not certificates of deposit, our pensions are 401(k)s, not defined-benefit plans -- but while some of us have been able to exchange the security of the past for greater economic opportunity, a majority of workers are absorbing more risk without accompanying reward. The paid-sick-leave numbers are just one indicator of this phenomenon.

I'm convinced that if Kerry and other candidates begin to hit the language that Hacker sets out for them, they will be met with the same "he really gets it" phenomenon that helped elect Clinton in 1992.