Sick Kid

Ian just woke up crying about a sore mouth. "Help me, mommy." He's warm and kicking off his covers. And I have three classes tomorrow. Steve has major deadlines this week and can't take off. My mom, who's also sick, has to pick him up tomorrow at 9:00. I won't be back until 4:00. How upset am I?

Seems like a good time to bring up an excellent blog post by Judith Warner. Since it's behind the TimesSelect wall, I have excerpted big chunks of her post for you.

In response to pressure from business groups, the Department of Labor has put out an official request for information on the Family and Medical Leave Act to find out if, as critics contend, the law is too generous and places an undue burden on employers who are required to comply with it.

Many of you may already be rolling your eyes. The United States, after all, ranks as one of the world’s most backward nations when it comes to family and medical leave benefits. A recent study from the McGill University Institute for Health and Social Policy in Montreal found that of 173 countries surveyed, 168 guaranteed women paid maternity leave. The United States – along with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland – was not one of them. Eighty-six million working Americans have no paid sick days to use to care for ill children, and nearly one in two workers – 59 million in all – has no paid sick leave at all. (For more sad statistics, see the McGill study.)

The Family and Medical Leave Act, which President Clinton signed into law back in 1993, offers only the most basic and restricted protections: 12 weeks of unpaid leave for new parents or those who need time off to tend to their own or a relative’s “serious illness.” Yet, these restrictions, a coalition of business groups is now coming forward to insist, simply aren’t restrictive enough. They say employees are abusing their right to medical leave, taking off work for mental health days, for cosmetic surgery and for things like “pink eye, ingrown toenails and colds,” as the Orwellian-sounding National Coalition to Protect Family Leave, an industry group, has put it.

In the coming weeks, the business groups will be submitting a host of comments of this nature to the Department of Labor. (If you’d like to weigh in, perhaps with a reality check, you can do so, before Feb. 16, at this Web site.)

Business groups are working to rewrite the law to make it nearly impossible for all by the nearly dead to take off work.

What’s interesting to me here is that it clearly isn’t politically acceptable anymore to attack family and medical leave by bashing working mothers. Our current villain du jour is the health care glutton, who consumes doctor’s visits like so many donuts, sloughing off the burdens of his waste onto the hard-working and the health-care abstemious.

The health care glutton is the new millennium’s version of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, whose appetite for spawning children and sucking down public funds knew no limit, and whose specter ultimately led our country to accept a situation in which low-income mothers were forced back to work without child care or medical benefits for their families.

If the past is any guide, the appearance of the health care glutton may portend similarly bad news for those lucky American workers who are entitled to sick days and family leave, or who enjoy adequate health insurance benefits. If we let it happen.

Comments

[jen]

tell me about it. I have been dropping tea tree oil into my kid's ear while she sleeps to ward off ear infections this week. The whole thing is so impossible.

I have an abuser of fmla in my workplace. but you know, its just not that big a deal. she reaps what she sows and people know the score. penalizing people who play by the rules is just so unfair. what are they thinking? its good to have sick people in the workplace, spreading germs, ecoli, who knows what?

its so very hard. good luck tomorrow. I hope he's well in the am. at least you have your mom...

[jen]

I personally have a long-standing policy of looking the other way when people clearly take their sick days to tend for their children. From what I have seen this is fairly common in the American workplace. (My husband is a SAHD so I'm not forced to take my sick time in this way ... which may be a reason why I'm able to continue with this policy for my staff. Sort of an only Nixon can go to China thing.)

My advice is if you need to stay home because of illness, do so. I'm sure you did this in your wild drinking days; just call in, cough a couple of times, plead 24-hour flu.

The odds are that your students will lose you completely as a teacher if you can't make your job work with your family. Think long-term. Stay home if you have to. And good luck.

[SamChevre]

First--I hope Ian gets well (and you don't get sick.)

But the "and nearly one in two workers – 59 million in all – has no paid sick leave at all" statistic is a bit tricky. I'm technically one of those workers--BUT what my employer did was to consolidate all time off as "paid time off." So I don't have "sick time"--but I can stay home sick if I need to.

[Ailurophile]

I'm sure there are people who abuse their FMLA leave. I'm also sure there are people who steal boxes of paperclips and surf pornographic websites on company time. But why penalize the many for the sins of a few?

I think the issue here is not even people "abusing the system" (which is ungenerous enough as it is!) but rather the increasingly robber-baron/Gilded Age business practices, expecting workers to be cheerful, uncomplaining slaves to the company. They want to only hire younglings in the pink of health, squeeze every ounce of work possible out of them, then kick them to the curb when they want to start families - or when they get serious illnesses.

We need a more humane system, period. It doesn't seem to be hurting Norway or Sweden any. Sure, they pay higher taxes but they also enjoy a much higher quality of life.

[Amy P]

There's got to be something wrong with that figure of 168 of 173 countries guaranteeing paid maternity leave. I looked on Wikipedia, and aside from the US and Australia it does look like every country Wikipedia listed has paid maternity leave, but I think we need a bit more information about the actual programs.

To begin with, there's the question of the self-employed. While I imagine that in a developed country it would be reasonably easy to set up a scheme for collecting and paying out money to doctors, freelance writers, graphic designers, tutors, and accountants, I'm wondering how female subsistence farmers in Subsaharan Africa get their maternity leave paid. Does someone from the government come and hoe their fields and pasture their goats for them? There's also the question of people working off the books and under the table.

Does Jane Galt (or anybody else) know anything about how well maternity leave programs work outside of Western Europe?

[luolin]

The comparison of countries in the McGill report is based on gov't policies, and acknowledges the problem Amy P. mentions.

From p. 1-2 of the McGill report:

"Out of 173 countries studied, 168 countries offer guaranteed leave with income to
women in connection with childbirth; 98 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks
paid leave. Although in a number of countries many women work in the informal
sector, where these government guarantees do not always apply, the fact remains that
the U.S. guarantees no paid leave for mothers in any segment of the work force,
leaving it in the company of only 4 other nations: Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New
Guinea, and Swaziland."

The end of report discusses the sources of their information.

luolin, currently trying to negotiate reassigned time for next semester

[Mrs. Ewer]

Hope your little guy is feeling much better today!

Forgive me (I’m young and childless), but I just don’t get this post.

European-style leave policies have done nothing to make parenthood more attractive. Judith Warner spends lots of time talking about how much “easier” it was to be a parent in France, but no time addressing the fact that few women in France choose to have children.

I don’t think my earnings should be taxed at a higher rate in order to provide day care for parents who choose the dual-career route. (Given the problems that ineffective programs like Head Start have had, I doubt that subsidized day care would be very beneficial for the kids anyway.) SAH parenting is hard, and there should be some rewards for it, like not having the cover the cost of daycare for other people. I mean, parents who stay at home often make do so at because they think institutional childcare isn’t good for small kids. Why should they be forced to pay for other people to use it?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but some of your previous posts have suggested that for you, working is more of a “want to” than a “need to.” So you want to work more than you want to be on call 24/7 in case one of your children gets sick. Kids do get sick (often at very inconvenient times), but you’re blessed to live close to your Mom, who is willing to babysit. You have someone (a close family member, even) lined up to watch your sick child. I guess what I don’t get is who you expect to teach your classes for you, or why you should get more of the taxpayer pie or your employer’s pie because you’ve decided to be a working mom.

[Mrs. Ewer]

Count my husband and I among those full-time workers who have generous paid leave policies but no designated sick leave. Can we use our leave when we’re sick or if we needed to take care of sick kids? Of course. Would we count as U.S. workers who have paid sick leave? Nope. I also wonder how many part-time workers are included in this figure.

And I’ve seen enough people abuse FMLA to believe that’s pretty common.

[artemisia]

Mrs. Ewer, maybe you should be taxed at a higher rate since you are failing to produce and raise, largely at your own expense, future taxpayers that will support you through social security and medicare programs.

It's only fair - aside from public education, I've invested a ton of money and time ensuring that my kids will eventually be productive, tax-paying citizens. Why should non-parents reap the rewards of our kids' future productivity?

[bj]

"ineffective programs like head start?"

Love et al (2005) "The Effectiveness of Early Head Start for 3-Year-Old Children and Their
Parents: Lessons for Policy and Programs" Developmental Psychology.

"Early Head Start programs had significant impacts on a range of child and parent outcomes when the children were 3 years old"

Yes, there's some question about how long-lasting these effects can be, but none that allow head start to be classified as "ineffective."

bj

PS: this is a different program than Head Start (with earlier intervention).

[Laura]

"Needing" to work for financial reasons is a very relative matter. I would say that we don't need the money right now, but we've also supported our whole family for a year in NYC on $30,000. Other people might look at horror at how we're living right now and say that a second income is definitely needed. I'm pretty low maintainence.

I need to work because I like working. I also like my kids and am trying to juggle both as well as I can. Sleep is not priority.

I've put my time in as a SAHP and now as a worker mom. When I was a SAHP, I was very supportive of my tax dollars going to fund daycares and paid time off for working moms, even those moms who didn't "need" the money. Now that I"m working, I recognize that the SAHPs in the community are doing a lot of work at the schools, church, and on the block, and I'm free riding. Most parents are pretty sympathetic about each other's work situtation. I really haven't seen so much of the mommy war stuff in real life.

I'm sorry, Mrs. Ewer, but on this issue I'm a hopeless commie. I think that family is important. I think my husband should coming home earlier to be with the family. I think that I'm damn lucky that my mom can help and recognize that most of my friends don't have relatives to help out. I think that the work-place needs to provide accomodations for the family, even at the expense of bottom lines of corporations. I've written a lot about this elsewhere. I'll get you links after I go shovel the snow.

[Laura]

I wonder how many people who are on record as having sick leave in the US can't in reality use any of that sick time. On paper, I have sick leave, but I have never used a sick day while teaching. On paper, my husband has sick leave, but he can't actually use any of those days either. He can never stay home when the kids are sick, even though his company officially would let him. In reality, his head would be on the chopping block if he did. And his job would be outsourced to Budapest, like others in his office. (BTW, Budapest is the new India. India is so 2006 for outsourcing.)

[Amy P]

If Head Start doesn't have significant positive long term effects, how can we call it effective? If the effect doesn't last, it's not a good use of funding.

[Amy P]

I think teachers are a special case with regard to sick leave, sick kids, etc. On the one hand, you generally put in fewer hours a year physically at work. On the other hand, you've really got to be there. I taught a number of years and I think I could count on one hand all the sick days I took. My husband is a professor and I'm pretty sure the same is true for him.

[learner]

Concluding that Head Start is ineffective in the long term results from at least three simple-minded biases: (1) that it is meaningful to measure "effectiveness" with standardized tests scores or simple rubrics assessing K-3 classroom skills, (2) that "long term" means in 3rd grade and (3) that numerous lifetime challenges facing Head Start kids don't matter.

A few years ago a prominent and sophisticated study (reported in the NYT) looked at adults who attended Head Start in the 1960s. Head Start individuals did better in metrics such as high school graduation rates and were less likely to have committed crimes or be incarcerated. This could only be seen once other factors were taken into account. Differences disappeared (or were reversed) when in more simple-minded, biased analyses.

[bj]

Thanks "learner." In addition, I'll add the the studies of the long-term impact of Head Start produces mixed results (not negative one's, it's just that every single study doesn't show huge positive impacts on the measures learner mentions). In addition, it appears that head-start like interventions continue to be necessary over time. Head start is not a cure, but a treatment. In order to get the benefits, it needs to be applied throughout children's early years.

Calling the impact of Head Start ineffective because limited measures of impact do not show significant effects 3+ years after the end of the Head Start is wrong. It's useful information, but it doesn't mean head start interventions are bad.

Contrast this with something I heard recently in a research seminar: incidents of delinquency increase if delinquent individuals are grouped together for intervention. The most obvious example of this is jail (i.e. people go to jail and come out more delinquent than they were before). But, childhood (middle-school) intervention programs also suggest that taking out a group of delinquent kids (i.e. one's who misbehave) and putting them all together increases the incidence of misbehavior. The current evidence is that the most effective treatment is to intervene very early (pre-school years) and teach both the parents & the children impulse control behavior.

Head start is a positve treatment that has potential, but is not a magic cure to all of the ills facing low-income families.

bj
PS: Sorry for hijacking. In this regard I'm a commie, too. And I'm not un-affluent. So, I'm a commie who wants to pay taxes to give children, who are people, a start in life, even if their parents are unable. If I could, I would offer universal pre-school to every child. I might even be willing to go with a voucher system for it (though it would have to be a 100% voucher -- no supplemental payments allowed).

[Amy P]

Apologizing in advance for further thread-hijacking, aren't there significant differences between different Head Start programs?

[Amy P]

While we're coming up with government programs, is there one that would do something for a sniffly and nauseous SAHM of two whose nearly 2-year-old naps irregularly and whose bouncy 4.5 year-old child was home Friday (sickness), Saturday and Sunday (weekend), Monday (sickness), and Wednesday and Thursday (@#$%^&* DC public schools snow day), with the possibility of Friday being another snow day, Saturday and Sunday being the weekend, Monday being President's Day, and a half-day coming up soon? There has been some husband home during that time, but it's still some sort of personal record for objectively worst two week period of the year. One more month of winter left!

[jen]

I'm still pondering Mrs. Ewer's comment about the potential for "[her] earnings being taxed at a higher rate in order to provide day care for parents who choose the dual-career route".

As a person who has lived thru a variety of statuses -- single-income, dual-income, with kids and without -- and filed the family taxes all the way through, I don't know if this statement stands up. Every year in our family I continue to marvel at how our taxes are going down, down, down. The SAH parent keeps our income level down. We own our house, and write off all the interest on it. We give to charity. We have two kids. This year we had two kids in private school and were able to write off much of that. (That alone accounted for a $500 refund from the state of Illinois.) Each year it's become a ritual. I do our taxes and discover we're getting hundreds back from federal -- and hundreds back from state. I march into HR yet again and get more disbelieving stares as I put my payroll exemptions up to 10, 11, 12 ... and the next year we still get refunds.

This is in amazing contrast to my girlfriends who are working moms, and I think it has to do with the difference between overall revenue and profit margin.

If you're in a dual-income family, your "revenue" is very high. But you clear very little -- all that income is immediately gobbled up by the bare necessities: food/clothing/shelter, housing, daycare, cars, insurance. Your "profit margin" is tiny. But since you're taxed on "revenue" regardless of your expenses, the taxes become a much higher proportion of your profits. This is compounded by the fact that, in a marriage, both adults' incomes are lumped together and the tax bracket allocated from the *sum*. On the plus side, you're incurring no opportunity cost in having one of your earners pull out of the economy for a while, and you're stacking up social security set-asides.

My little family has a fraction of the income of a dual-earner family. But what falls into the necessity category is much less. One car is OK, no need for ultra-expensive day-care. We have time to cook at home. Of course we are incurring the huge delayed expense of my husband having to go back to school when the kids get bigger, and he has no retirement savings. But when it comes to calculating the taxes alone, they are a smaller proportion of our total income and a *much* smaller proportion of our "profit".

Given this math, I'm just not seeing the argument that underwriting some day care makes for unequal taxation. If anything, based on my personal anecdotal evidence, it seems such a change would really be more of a correction. Am I getting the math wrong?

[bj]

Hey Amy:

I think there should be something for you -- a drop in sort of child care that lets you get a kid break. I think that the situation you're describing is boggling, and a major source of survival in the past was to be able to rely on a village (extended family, friends, neighbors). I don't think stay-at-home parents can be expected to survive that situation on a regular basis without help, and certainly some of them can't.

The situation you describe is exactly why I think my mix of child care options (which include family, school, and day care) is better for my children than my staying at home would be. I've been where you are for a week (i.e. snow days, stomach flu, traveling grandparents, who are my normal backup), and I start going crazy (and my kids notice).

bj

[Amy P]

Thanks, bj.

Inspired by your post, I just e-mailed my college student sitters. I'm hoping someone will be available over the next couple days. They're very good, but at $10 an hour it really adds up fast.

[Laura]

I would do better than that, Amy P. I think that stay at home moms should receive salaries from the gov't. If the gov't pays childcare workers to watch other people's children, then they must pay women who do the work themselves.

Hope you had some time off. I need a date night, too. Also sleep.

[Laura]

I would do better than that, Amy P. I think that stay at home moms should receive salaries from the gov't. If the gov't pays childcare workers to watch other people's children, then they must pay women who do the work themselves.

Hope you had some time off. I need a date night, too. Also sleep.