Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
Farmworker Francisco Quintana receives a COVID-19 vaccine at a Santa Clara County mobile clinic at Monterey Mushrooms, an agricultural employer, March 3, 2021, in Morgan Hill, California.
As the director of the local health department in Oak Park, Illinois, Dr. Theresa Chapple does a little bit of everything. Reports of menacing wildlife, restaurant inspections, and environmental threats all pile up on her desk. But when the pandemic hit last year, her work became more singularly focused: to keep her community safe from COVID-19.
So far, vaccines have gone a long way in helping her achieve that goal. With two-thirds of eligible Oak Park residents fully vaccinated, the Chicago suburb has mitigated the worst effects of the virus this year. But like in the rest of the country, the delta variant poses a new challenge, and ensuring that the remaining third receives their complete set of shots is Chapple’s latest test. Her routine involves getting out into the community two days a week to talk to residents, and if they haven’t yet been vaccinated, to learn why.
Vaccine hesitancy has by and large been framed as a political concern: distrust in the government, in Big Pharma, in the scientific process. But from Chapple’s experience speaking to countless members of her community, a main barrier has in fact proved to be economic. Without paid time off work, some residents of Oak Park have been unable to find the time to get vaccinated.
In comparison to their European counterparts, workers in the United States receive notoriously few vacation days—or in this case, vaccine days. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a quarter of Americans who work in the private sector don’t receive any paid time off at all. Embarrassingly, the United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee pay when employees take time off work for illness or vacation.
With the majority of Americans receiving a two-dose vaccine, the process can be time-intensive. Not only might workers need time to get the vaccine, they may need a full day after each shot to deal with the minor symptoms that could result. If a prospective patient lacks child care, transportation, paid time off, or all of these things, they’re less likely to get vaccinated.
A quarter of Americans who work in the private sector don’t receive any paid time off at all.
A recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that offering paid time off can make a significant difference in whether workers opt for a jab. Yet only half of the employees surveyed say their employer is offering them paid time off to receive the vaccine. Those figures are even more bleak when broken down along racial lines. Black employees are even less likely to receive a day off, with only 38 percent of those surveyed reporting that they were given paid time off for the vaccine.
Several major corporations have announced incentives to ensure their workers are vaccinated. Amazon has committed to doling out $40 bonuses per dose, and Walmart is offering employees three days of paid time off, which accounts for the shots’ potential side effects.
But for Walmart, at least, the reality of whether employees are actually able to take days off often falls to store management. On Reddit, dozens of Walmart employees have posted that their managers didn’t know about the program. One user described their team lead as looking like a “deer in the headlights” when asked if the worker could take time off to recover from a shot. Another argued the lack of communication to management was “by design.”
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“Walmart doesn't want to pay you for the time off nor do they want to hire more people to cover said shifts that should be covered in the first place,” posted one employee in a forum. The individual only wanted one day off, having received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but had difficulty securing it. The aggrieved Redditors depict Walmart’s supposed paid time off program as a large-scale PR stunt.
Walmart did not immediately respond for comment.
When employees are categorized as temp workers or subcontractors, paid time off is even less certain. Ron Herrera, the director of the Teamsters Port Division, says that independent contractors often transport freight for major corporations, but receive no benefits. During the pandemic, that has meant no paid sick days or time off for the vaccine. Working for an hourly wage, contractors often can’t afford to dip out of work for a shot, or risk a fever and chills in the days following. “If you’re not pulling loads, you’re not getting paid,” he told the Prospect in a phone interview.
Even though independent contractors don’t technically fall under the Teamsters’ purview—the organization represents unionized workers—they were still determined to find a work-around to vaccinate freight drivers, unionized or not. Partnering up with a community clinic, the Teamsters brought vaccines to the ports so that drivers could receive a shot on a lunch break or right after work, instead of on a day off.
Despite government incentives, public pressure, and business logic, some employers are still valuing profit generation over worker health.
Juan Carlos Giraldo, a driver for the company Container Connection in Los Angeles, is one of these employees who is misclassified as an independent contractor. He says the firm deliberately keeps him as a contractor, and not a full-time employee, to avoid liability or responsibility. Regularly working 80 to 90 hours a week, Giraldo says that without the pop-up Teamsters clinic, he wouldn’t have had the time for him and his wife to get vaccinated.
Employers and local governments are balancing the fine line between using the carrot or stick approach when it comes to vaccine motivation. While vaccine mandates are starting to ramp up, with federal workers, employees at businesses like Shake Shack, and personnel at over 800 hospitals now required to get vaccinated, offering paid time off has emerged as a gentler alternative.
Earlier this week in Shelby County, Tennessee, the home of Memphis, Mayor Lee Harris rolled out a paid time off program for government employees. Legislation passed at the state level late last year blocked Harris from enacting mandates, so he was forced to consider a different method. Harris hopes to work with the county’s largest employers, including FedEx and AutoZone, to expand the program from the public to private sector.
“We will do whatever it takes to get more shots in arms,” Harris said. “This is just the start.” In Tennessee, the vaccine is still largely politicized, with less than 40 percent of the eligible population fully vaccinated.
Meanwhile, the White House and a handful of state governments have created further incentives for employers to provide paid time off for the vaccine. In April, President Biden developed a tax credit for small and medium-sized employers—those with fewer than 500 employees—to give paid time off. “No working person in this country should lose a single dollar from their paycheck to take time to get the shot or recover from it,” Biden said in a statement at the time.
Yesterday, Biden went even further. He announced that those same firms will now receive a tax credit if employees take time off to get their families and children vaccinated. The expanded program comes as the vaccine rate among kids remains low: Only 41 percent of Americans aged 12 to 17 have received at least one dose.
But the program only covers about 50 percent of the private workforce. And even if a company does benefit from the tax credit, employers might not want to jump through IRS hoops to redeem the refund, or front the cost until tax season.
Some states have opted for a little more force. New York state requires all employers to give at least four hours off per shot—and the time has to be compensated. In California, under the Supplemental Paid Sick Leave mandate, employers are required to provide time off for vaccinations, in addition to a host of other COVID-related complications, such as self-isolation.
Despite government incentives, public pressure, and business logic, some employers are still valuing profit generation over worker health. When that’s the case, it’s fallen to local nonprofits and health agencies to physically bring vaccines to workers. Chapple, the director of the local health department in Oak Park, Illinois, can hardly contain her excitement over her latest tactic: a mobile vaccine clinic.
“We’re doing our best to go where the people are,” she said.
