In Sickness and Health

WHAT IS OUR responsibility to expectant mothers, workers suffering from prolonged illness, or parents with children dealing with a significant sickness? Many Christians will assume the “our” in question refers to individual believers or the church as a community of believers. But what if the “our” refers to society as a whole? How is the question answered then?

This is more than an abstract question. Across the U.S.—at local, state, and federal levels—governments are debating policies that would expand paid sick leave. The issue itself isn’t complicated: Some workers have paid time off when they or a family member falls ill, while tens of millions of others—disproportionately low-wage workers—do not. The latter often face the difficult choice of struggling through shifts while sick or staying home and putting their livelihoods at risk.

The benefits of paid sick leave policies are well documented, with studies detailing the economic benefits paid sick leave provides by lowering employee turnover and training costs, reducing public-assistance spending, and improving productivity. “Working sick costs the national economy $160 billion annually in lost productivity,” according to the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Even greater gains can be realized when expanded family leave policies are included.

Opponents of expanding paid sick leave contend that such policies are detrimental to business, but their arguments have proven hollow. In a recent editorial titled “Sick Leave Doesn’t Hurt Business, Says Business,” Bloomberg View columnist Christopher Flavelle examines the actual effects on businesses in jurisdictions where more-expansive policies have been enacted. Based on the evidence, he concludes that few companies have reported a reduction in profits, sick days were used appropriately and the benefit was not abused, workers’ other compensation and hours were not dramatically reduced (countering the theory that companies might offset the costs of providing the benefit), and the prices of goods and services were only marginally effected, despite claims that the additional burdens to employers would be passed on to consumers.

The significant benefits and relatively few costs, the overall popularity of the idea (a 2010 poll by the National Partnership for Women and Families found overwhelming support for a variety of laws that would expand paid sick leave), and a sustained campaign supporting paid sick leave have pushed the issue into the national spotlight. Earlier this year, President Obama announced an executive action providing additional benefits to federal workers and urged Congress to pass the Healthy Families Act, which would allow employees to earn one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, capped at 56 hours annually, unless the employer chooses to set a higher limit.

Some Christians are leading on this issue. In urging the city council of Tacoma, Wash., to pass a paid sick leave law (which it did in January), Rev. Ann Adkinson, a pastor at Tacoma’s First United Methodist Church, said, “I and members of my congregation feel this is a justice issue that springs out of who Jesus was and good news for the poor and oppressed that he came to proclaim.” In a Christianity Today online article looking at the maternity-leave policies at Christian colleges and universities, Mandy McMichael asked what not offering paid maternity leave “says about [Christian employers’] commitment to families when they fail to support families through their own maternity leave policies.”

And that’s the crux of the issue. Christian political activism on the Right in recent decades has often been self-defined as “pro-family.” Sadly, many of these initiatives were more about politics than policy outcomes. But the movement for paid sick leave could be the exception to this rule, if Christians of all stripes are willing to find common ground in support of a relatively small policy goal that could have large, positive effects for both families and the nation.