Illness doesn’t keep some home

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — For Veronica Mendoza, the message delivered by memo last month came across loud and clear: If you’re sick, stay home.

So, when the 48-year-old food- service worker recently came down with a runny nose, itchy eyes and other flulike symptoms, she wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed. But with no paid sick leave, she opted to punch the clock instead.

“I pretty much have to be at death’s door before I’ll call in sick,” said Mendoza, a cafeteria worker for a company that contracts with schools in the Chicago area.

Despite nationwide concern over the H1N1 virus and a barrage of announcements from public-health officials imploring Americans to call in sick, many employees continue to drag themselves into the workplace, powered by Tylenol, lozenges and fistfuls of tissues.

Pandemic or not, many staffers say, it’s better to show up wheezing and sneezing than be perceived as a slacker, especially when jobs are scarce.

With only about 60 percent of all private-sector workers getting compensated when they are ill, unions and other advocates have seized on the flu outbreak as a way to bring new energy to an old issue.

A survey last year by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that “68 percent of those not eligible for paid sick days said they had gone to work with a contagious illness like the flu.”

Last month, U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., introduced legislation, called the Emergency Influenza Containment Act, that would mandate five paid sick days for employees with a contagious illness, such as H1N1.

The bill is limited to workplaces with 15 or more employees and would expire in two years, provisions that were not in previous proposals that stalled in committee, said a spokesman in Miller’s office.

But many business groups, such as the Society for Human Resource Management and the National Retail Federation, oppose the measure. They assert that a recession is not the time to saddle companies with more entitlements, preferring to see firms deal with this issue on a case-by-case basis.

In response, the Service Employees International Union blasted the opposition. “Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to force someone battling H1N1 to come to work either couldn’t care less about the well-being of his employees or couldn’t know less about the way disease and infection spreads,” SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger said.

For another food service employee, Cathy Gaul, the consequences were even more ominous. After taking four days off at St. Charles North High School for her own illness and to care for a sick child, Gaul recently received a written reprimand, now a permanent part of her personnel file.

Mendoza and Gaul are members of SEIU Local 1 and are employed by Sodexo Inc., which serves more than 200 accounts in the Chicago area in health care, education and corporate services.

“The policy regarding absences was reviewed and approved by the union before being distributed to employees,” said Sodexo spokesman Alfred King.