The coronavirus issue has me thinking about paid sick leave from new perspectives. I never approved of people not getting paid sick days, but now I’m honestly wondering how and why the hell we ever let it get like this.
It’s been well documented at this point that anything less than an N95 mask doesn’t really do much to contain the spread of a virus and I’ve yet to see anyone at any restaurant wearing one. Sometimes you see food preparation done by people with surgical style masks on, but that’s just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. They might not cough or sneeze directly onto the food, but it’s not preventing them from spreading virus around or preventing them from contracting it.
Essentially, every time I go to a public restaurant I’m now going to be thinking about all the sick people that are probably working their shift because they can’t afford not to and how I’m probably getting virus laden food all the time. Why would anyone ever want to go out to eat knowing this fact? How did we get brainwashed into thinking this was a great idea? I’ll pay another 50 cents or $1 for a value meal if it gets people paid sick leave, but profit is really not the issue since McDs had net income of $6.025B in 2019 and bought back $30 billion in stock from 2013-2016.
Companies like Walmart and Apple are also making stock buybacks in the tens of billions and hundreds of billions rather than pay people sick leave.
And yet you can still find in first page search results for “walmart stock buyback” a media outlet rising to the defense of Walmart and Apple for their stock buybacks. The defense being that the companies that do the most buybacks also have the biggest capital investments as well.
Walmart, for its part, said last year it would buy back $20 billion in stock. Yet the company has invested at least $10 billion annually for the past three years in an effort to meet head-on competition from Amazon
Did they invest $10 billion in making sure their employees aren’t coming into work sick all the time?!
No. They didn’t. Because now they, among others, are all scrambling to give people temporary paid sick time just for this outbreak.
Great, this time, during a massive pandemic, people can stay out sick, but how about when flu season rolls around again? Why do people have to endure sick employees spreading disease everywhere because the company is too cheap to pay people for when they inevitably get sick?
How is this logical for a business looking to be efficient anyway? Sick employee comes in, doesn’t work as hard because they feel like crap, they end up infecting other employees they are working with and customers as well. Now you have a group of workers that are feeling like crap and coming in to work and not working as hard and you have customers that won’t be coming in to shop at your store or eat at your restaurant because they are sick.
Then keep going down the line, the people that get sick that have secondary health issues, those people end up at the hospital and since they are shopping and eating at these low cost establishments they probably are some of the 27.5 million people that still have no health insurance and then does anyone have to wonder why the fuck we pay more than any other country on this planet per capita for health insurance?!
So, not only are we getting harmful diseases because of corporate greed, not only is our food being contaminated by corporate greed, we’re paying more to solve any issues resulting from those situations, because of corporate greed!