Proposed law would require employers to pay workers for sick time off would promote swine flu pandemic

Thursday, November 05, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: employees, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) It sounds good at first: When employers send sick workers home so they don't spread swine flu around the work environment, they must still pay those workers for the full day's work. The idea behind this bill is that many workers can't afford being sent home without pay, and therefore the employer must pay them anyway.

But apparently no one in Washington D.C. has thought about the real-world consequences of what this bill would do. If employers are forced to pay for workers whether they're working or not, they will refuse to send sick workers home in the first place! And why is that? Because employers can't afford to be paying for people who aren't working.

Thus, this bill would assure that sick, infected workers are kept on the job where they can spread swine flu to others.

If the U.S. Congress wants to accelerate the spread of swine flu, this bill is a brilliant way to accomplish it.

Unintended consequences

It all comes down to The Law of Unintended Consequences. The U.S. Congress -- which is completely useless in a true Democracy and should be disbanded -- arrogantly writes new laws, thinking they will intervene in the lives of workers or employers in some "positive" way by forcing somebody to do something they wouldn't normally do.

But every such intervention has unintended consequence that the numbskulls in Congress never consider (because they can't think beyond the next election cycle). The unintended consequences are usually quite disastrous, such as the future public debt fallout from the trillion-dollar bailout of the wealthy investment banks and Wall Street insiders who were "saved" from financial collapse at taxpayer expense.

In this case, this "pay sick workers to stay home" bill will absolutely guarantee that virtually no sick workers are ever sent home. And that, in turn, will guarantee the spread of whatever pandemic is circulating through the workforce at the time, especially since many low-wage workers have jobs in the food and service industries where they are in frequent contact with items consumed by the general public.

The bill should probably be called the "Pandemic Promotion Act of 2009."

And besides, whatever happened to the idea that you get paid for the days you work? Sometimes you get sick and can't work. That's real life. The best way to avoid losing income due to sick days is to take care of your own health with nutrition and vitamin D. That's called being an adult.

But who am I kidding? I've seen first-hand how grocery store deli employees sneeze all over the food they're wrapping up for customers. In many ways, many of the adult workers in America don't act with much responsibility. They show up for work sick, caring nothing for the coworkers or customers they might infect. And why? Because they need the paycheck.

So what's the real solution to all this? The solution isn't about shifting the cost of sickness to the employer or the employee; the real solution is to teach the nation about vitamin D and thereby keep the workforce healthy and well.

This simple, powerful idea has apparently never crossed the minds of the members of the U.S. Congress. Keep Americans healthy? That's an alien concept. It has never even entered the discussions about health care reform.

Instead, Congress is focused on how to keep the drug companies profitable with more customers and more profits. And that goal stands in direct conflict with the goal of keeping Americans healthy. When the U.S. Congress is in session, the health (and job security) of the American people remains at risk, because in the quest to "do something" to pretend to help the people, our elected representatives will routinely ignore the far greater problem of why the health of our nation is crumbling.

Why do people get sick in the first place?

Much of it has to do with extreme deficiencies in key nutrients, including vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, phytonutrients and so on. The FDA, though, has made it a crime to even sell a product that claims to enhance health via nutrition, and the FTC has declared war on any natural product that actually works to prevent cancer. The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, argues over who will pay for disease.

Sometimes, you just gotta wonder: Has America gone mad? Have these people lost their minds, or are they just on so many meds that they can't think anymore?

Increasingly, I see worrisome signs that America is headed for disaster. When the lawmakers can't see the real root of the major problems, and the solutions to those problems have been outlawed or censored out of existence, the future of that nation begins to look sketchy. Pandemic or not, America has made itself the junk food & medication capitol of the world, and that's not a recipe for a healthy workforce.

Whether people get paid for sick days or not is a miniscule issue compared to the much bigger question of why nobody has told the workforce to take more vitamin D so they can protect themselves from influenza in the first place.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/id...