I tend to think it's easier to not see the lack of mandatory paid vacation and holiday as much of a problem if you're a highly educated, white collar worker, and even easier if you're a stay-at-home, freelance writer. It will simply never be true for you that the minimum is your reality.
But that doesn't mean it's not true for others. According to the CEPR study (pdf), about a quarter of workers don't get any paid vacation or holidays. If you make less than $15 an hour, that number jumps to 31%. If you do get paid vacation, on average, you get 12 days of it a year. That's less than the statutory minimum in every advanced country save Japan and Canada, and I'd bet the average in both countries well outpaces the average here.
And it's not just vacation days. Nearly half of all private sector workers get no paid sick days. In the bottom quarter of US workers, 80% are deprived -- and this is exactly the group that can't afford to take an unpaid sick day. And so far as family values go, only one in three workers has paid sick days they can use to care for ill children.
But really, unpaid is a bit misleading here: The employer isn't paying for worker illness, to be sure. But we are. As Bob Herbert reports:
I recently spoke with Bertha Brown, a home health aide who lives in Philadelphia and has two young daughters. She makes $7 an hour caring for people who are ill or disabled. “I feed them and dress them,” she said. “And if they have to be changed, I do all that.”
She has worked for the better part of two decades without ever being paid for a sick day. And her wages are so low she can't afford to lose even a day's pay. “If I get sick, I work sick,” she said. “I cover my nose and my mouth with a mask to keep my clients from getting sick.”
Food service workers are among those least likely to get paid sick days. Eighty-six percent get no sick days at all. They show up in the restaurants coughing and sneezing and feverish, and they start preparing and serving meals. You won't see many of them wearing masks.
If you don't want your fries coming with a side of influenza, incidentally, there's some good legislation kicking around Congress that would mandate paid sick days. You can support it here.
