John Hersey
Before the pandemic, gig work had been a good choice for Jonathan Perales. He was a single parent in Arlington, Texas, trying to spend more time with his young daughter, and, he said, because driving for Uber, Uber Eats, and Postmates allowed him to make his own schedule, “when I’m with my daughter, I can be with her 100 percent. Then, when she’s with her mom, I can go out and work just as much as I need to to pay the bills.”
But in mid-March 2020—early enough in the pandemic that he’d been dubbed an “essential worker,” but when there was no place to get tested for the virus—he came down with symptoms, and reached out to Uber to let them know. “They told me the only way for me to get any money for being sick would be to come back with a positive COVID test. I kept explaining to them that there are no tests, but that I was recommended to stay home and self-quarantine.”
Like millions of other workers across the U.S., Perales scrambled to figure out how to pay the bills while also doing his best to comply with doctor’s orders and public-health guidelines. Without a state or local ordinance requiring paid sick time, and as a gig worker technically classified as an independent contractor, he was entitled to no pay for his time in self-isolation. The pandemic brought home the fact that the roughly 33 million people who have no paid sick leave often have to choose between caring for themselves and their community or making the rent. It also brought home that so many of those lacking paid time off when ill are those we call “essential,” whether delivering food, like Perales, or working in a meat processing plant, a grocery store, or even a health care facility. The very people uncovered by current law are the ones most likely to pick up the virus at work, and whose work means they may well pass it on if they are not given time to care for themselves.
Uber had announced in March that it would be providing up to 14 days of paid sick leave to drivers if they needed to quarantine due to the coronavirus. (Uber did not respond to a request for comment for this article.) But Perales, like other workers, found that actually getting the pay required jumping through hoop after hoop. He was told he had to have a doctor or state official send paperwork to the company, but health department officials asked why he couldn’t just submit it himself; finally, he got it through, but by the time he heard back from the company, he’d run out of money and lost the room he was renting in a motel. “They basically told me, ‘Kick rocks. We’re not going to let you expose our customers, but at the same time, we’re not going to pay you.’”
Perales was homeless for five months, living out of the car he’d used to make his deliveries. He chokes up even now, talking about it. “They called me and they said, ‘We’re sorry we didn’t do anything before. Here’s $314 to quarantine for two weeks.’ I told them, ‘That wouldn’t even cover my motel fees, rent, even if I did still have a place.’ They told me that without a positive COVID test they weren’t able to do anything else.”
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Out of desperation, he made a couple of deliveries while he was supposed to be isolating; he doubted that he was the only one who’d worked sick. He held off from seeing his daughter, not wanting to expose her to the virus; he’s only recently been able to begin spending time with her again. A GoFundMe and the support of people who heard about his story—including the worker organization Working Washington—have helped him get back on his feet, and he’s taking classes now in information technology. “I’ve had people tell me before, ‘Go get a real job,’” he said, but it was hard to find other work. “My fallback was always warehouse work. Not so much anymore. It’s a huge exposure risk. I used to work at Amazon. If I work there [again], I’m definitely not going to be able to see my daughter without exposing her.”
The one thing he’s glad about is that more attention has come to issues like the need for paid sick time. “COVID created a situation where everybody could relate to it and realize that it’s something that could happen to anybody,” he says. “I’ve always felt that people who are homeless, people who are experiencing poverty, it’s not their fault. It wasn’t their fault before COVID and it’s definitely not their fault after COVID.”
There are millions of people with some sort of caring responsibility to worry about in addition to their own routine illnesses.
“IT SHOULDN’T TAKE a pandemic to remind us how interdependent we are, that each of us is only as healthy as everyone else we come in contact with,” says Ellen Bravo, strategic adviser and co-founder at Family Values @ Work, an organization that advocates for sick leave and other policies that help workers have a livable working life.
In the 1980s, Bravo founded the Milwaukee chapter of the organization 9to5 for working women, and went on to become its national director. By the late 1990s, after welfare reform, she realized how many of the women she met who’d relied on welfare were there because of a caregiving crisis: A child or a parent would get ill, they’d need care, and the woman would lose her job and wind up relying on benefits. The organization had already been advocating paid leave for longer-term illnesses or the birth of a child, but, she said, “We thought, ‘It isn’t just paid family and medical leave. We need short-term leave for routine illness,’ and we all just start referring to it as paid sick days.”
There are millions of people with some sort of caring responsibility to worry about in addition to their own routine illnesses. And while many of those carers these days are fathers like Jonathan Perales, Bravo points out that the reason sick days are considered an afterthought is gendered: “Workplaces were designed as if all workers were men who had a wife at home full time to take care of those who needed care and that those men would tough it out.”
What Bravo calls “the movement for time to care” has always seen short-term sick leave and longer-term family leave as interconnected. Yet they tend to be structured very differently. Paid sick days, she explained, sets a “minimum labor standard, like minimum wage, that all employers can do.” The employers themselves are required to pay for short-term paid sick days under the laws that have passed; workers normally accrue the leave based on the time they’ve put in at the job, as in New York City’s law, where employees must accrue at least one hour of sick time for every 30 hours they work, up to 40 hours sick leave for the year, or employers can choose to simply offer 40 hours to each employee. Small businesses, Bravo noted, tend to like the paid sick time laws because they level the playing field, rather than costing a small employer who wants to do right by their employees more money than a big employer who might not care to.
In contrast, longer-term paid family leave is or would be a social-insurance policy. In California, for example, the Paid Family Leave program is paid for through state disability insurance taxes and provides up to 60 or 70 percent of a worker’s wages for up to eight weeks.
Many unionized workers have paid sick time through a collective-bargaining agreement—according to the Economic Policy Institute, nine in ten workers who are covered by a union contract have access to paid sick days, and 97 percent of those in the public sector who have a union contract do. But as union density in the U.S. has fallen to 10.3 percent, no matter how good a sick time arrangement might be in a contract, few workers have access to them, underscoring the need for federal legislation to set a baseline.
The first federal bill to provide paid sick time was the Healthy Families Act, introduced in 2004 by Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. There’s a 2020 version of it—it still hasn’t passed—introduced by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and in the House by Rep. Rosa DeLauro. The bill would require employers with 15 or more employees to provide up to 56 hours of paid sick leave, accrued at the same rate as New York’s law, one hour per 30 hours worked.
The first local paid sick days ordinance was enacted in San Francisco in 2006, after a ballot initiative campaign led by young immigrant workers. The law there, which provides sick leave to all workers, including temps and part-timers, accrued at the rate of one hour per 30 hours worked, remains, according to Bravo, one of the best laws in the country.
But what happened in Milwaukee in 2008 reminded the movement that their opponents were not going away so easily. When a ballot initiative got 68 percent of the vote, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce sued. That case dragged on until 2011, when an appeals court upheld the ordinance. But by then, Scott Walker was governor of Wisconsin, and in May of 2011 he signed a law preempting local sick leave ordinances. A court upheld Walker’s ban, and Wisconsin still lacks paid sick time.
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All told, 38 localities and 14 states have enacted such laws. The idea is widely popular. A May poll found that support for paid sick days pushed undecided voters toward candidates who backed the policy; another spring poll found 78 percent of Americans wanted guaranteed paid sick leave for workers.
A number of these laws, however, exclude many workers, particularly those who work for smaller employers. In jurisdictions without such laws, or where the laws fail to cover many eventualities, paid leave policies can leave much to be desired. They may cover a worker’s sickness, but not their children’s. They may bundle sick days with vacation days, and some companies with this provision require advance notice to qualify—as if an illness gives advance warning.
Some companies even put workers into “PTO debt” if their illness eats up more sick time than they’d accrued, meaning they have to work it off or even pay it back in cash if they leave before they’ve earned their time back.
And then there are gig workers like Perales, who are not classified as employees. In July, though, Seattle passed an emergency measure that would provide paid sick time to gig workers who drive for companies like Uber or do food delivery. Backed by Working Washington, the law allows those workers to accrue paid time off during the duration of the COVID-19 emergency. Orlando Santana is one of those drivers, working for Instacart, Amazon Flex, and others. His background is in graphic design, but he began picking up gig work when he was let go from a media job, and it’s now his main source of income.
There was a restaurant in the area, Santana says, that had to temporarily close because a couple of its employees tested positive for COVID. “If I had delivered from that store, the right thing for me to do would be to stop working, go get tested, wait for my results. Well, those few days that you’re waiting for your test results, you can’t work, so you’re losing income. Having access to sick leave for those times, it helps to lift the burden a little bit.”
These emergency measures, Bravo says, are helpful but insufficient. “It was heartening to see Congress quickly pass the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, but it is important to know how many people are not covered: up to 106 million.” What is necessary now is to build on the sense of urgency that the pandemic created, so that all workers, including those we now call “essential,” have the ability to stay home when they’re sick.
“We always knew that for everyone to be covered, we had to have federal law. It needed to be uniform and inclusive and cover the whole country,” she continues. “We can’t be a country that says, ‘We want to stop institutional racism’ and then not look at the actual institutions that are perpetuating it.”
SOME WORKERS, frustrated at being repeatedly at risk of firing if sick, have taken things into their own hands. In Raleigh, North Carolina, LaMeaka Moses began work at Bojangles fast food in October of 2019. She said there was always pressure on her to work sick. “I got sick one day and they didn’t even want me to leave. I mean vomiting and everything!” she said. “I have numerous co-workers [managers] tried to write them up for calling out of work because they think they’re lying.”
When the pandemic began, Moses continued to work, but she began to notice people missing from her shifts. Around August 3, she heard rumors that someone at her workplace had the virus. She paid it little mind. When she went to look at the new schedule, however, another piece of paper drew her eye because it said, “COVID-19.” The paper stated that an employee had tested positive for the virus, wished them well, and gave some guidance for what to do if workers felt ill. “At that point, for me, it was just the final straw.”
That morning, Moses and her colleague Lisa Foster walked off the job. Foster’s son, Dekembe Black, who had begun working the night shift, joined them on strike.
“Enough is enough,” Moses says. “I felt like they were playing with my life. I felt like management and every supervisor and people up the ladder made a decision for me that I was supposed to make for myself, but they didn’t give me a choice.” She has three daughters, and when the company chose not to notify her, she says it put her children at risk. “They said they only notified three that were in close proximity to the individual, but everybody is in close proximity to everybody. There is no way that you can be six feet apart working in Bojangles.”
Amanda Arnold, director of human resources for Tri-Arc Food Systems, the local Bojangles franchise, said in an email, “Employees that were identified as close contacts, defined by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as being within 6 feet for more than 15 minutes, were immediately contacted and were asked to self-quarantine for 14 days. Those employees will be paid during that time. Response bulletins were posted in the location on August 7 to notify all employees of the positive case.”
Moses and Foster didn’t just walk out, though. Moses reached out to local news reporters, who reported on the story, and she also called the state health department and reached out to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to file complaints. The health department, Moses said, called her back after they spoke to Bojangles’s head office, telling her that they said the store had been deep-cleaned—which Arnold also emphasized in her email to me—and there was nothing to be done. No one at OSHA called her back, though when the local Fight for $15 campaign heard about the strike, they reached out to support the workers and helped her file an OSHA complaint.
Moses, Foster, and Black responded by demanding proof of professional deep cleaning of the store, $15 an hour hazard pay, and two weeks of paid leave to self-quarantine. To Moses and Black, giving the workers time to self-isolate should have been an obvious move. “My life should be more important than your dollar because y’all are not hurting. You are a multimillion-dollar company,” Moses says.
When he began working at the store, Black, like all the employees, had been given a shirt that said, “Risk it for the Biscuit.” It encapsulated, to him, his mother, and Moses, how the company thought about its workers. “Do y’all really want us to risk it for the biscuit?!” Moses asks. “Risk our lives, really, for Bojangles?”
