Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

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What I didn't see mentioned that concerns me (although I admit it might be a concern born purely out of ignorance): No mention of whether employees would be provided with a minimum of 2 weeks paid sick leave should they show symptoms of COVID-19. Any employee who has a reasonable chance of becoming ill with COVID-19 at their work, and who does not also have a minimum of 2 weeks paid leave, should, by all logic I can think of, refuse to return to work. In a situation with no paid sick leave or less than 2 weeks of paid sick leave, the options are mostly reduced to 2: First, return to work, get sick, then get fired for absence while off sick. Or, second, remain home and get fired for absence while remaining healthy. I suppose there is the third options, the danger-face economic kamikaze model that most Americans will likely be expected to endure - go to work, hope you don't get sick, get sick anyway, get fired for absence. Then you can't even file for unemployment. There is no winning play.

Fundamental flaws in US health care and worker protection exposed. That's what this is.

Compare to the system in my native Belgium:

- a month of 100% paid sick leave, paid by the employer

- followed by five months 60% of wage in sick leave, paid by social security

- protected from redundancy within this 6 month period

- if made redundant afterwards while still ill after 6 months, obligation for the employer to pay (significant) damages

- 60% of last wage sick pay afterwards, capped to a generous maximum, unlimited in time as long as the illness lasts, paid by social security

- high quality healthcare regardless of employment status

- jobless benefits when healthy without a job, unlimited in time, recently made somewhat degressive

This makes for less of a power imbalance between employers and employees. Huge short and medium term social stabiliser. Certainly not without its flaws, but great to have in place during these times of severe economic crisis.

I'm happy to live in a country with such a strong social safety net as well, compared to the US (even though I don't profit from it at all being young, self-employed and unmarried...), but on the other hand I'm really concerned about our future. Someone has to pay for this and it's not like the government is encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and to learn some personal responsibility, with all the benefits they're giving for not working.

This is spot on. For all the praise of Belgian welfare I believe there is a 'dark' side to it. It is not doing well in motivating people to perform and there is a lot of systemic slack and abuse, like people claiming they're sick for a ridiculous amount of time every year.

*Note that firing an employee for not performing is quite difficult and the tax bracket at the top is outrageously high.

The thing is, people everywhere want to work, with extraordinarily few exceptions. A government doesn't really need to incentivize work in general, only some specific kinds of work which are underperformed.

Citation? I find it funny that no matter how many times history, and even contemporary events, have taught us otherwise, people still believe "People don't need strong incentives to work!"

You can look at employment rates in countries with generous social welfare and unemployment benefits, and notice that the percentage of the population sitting idle who are not sick is minuscule, and not significantly different format the idle population in countries with weak unemployment benefits.

It is true that there are systematic exceptions - especially people born rich.

Productivity in the US is considerably higher than most, if not all of those countries, when you account for productivity per hour and hours worked: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/v/s/www.forbes.c...

Unemployment just tells you people have a job, and nothing about how much that job is contributing to the collective resources.

According to the OECD, productivity per hour worked [0] in Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland is comparable to the US, and in some cases significantly higher. All of these countries have much more generous social safety nets.

P.S. The link you gave 404's here.

[0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

The average hours worked are significantly less for those small upticks in PPH. If you factor in hours worked, the US comes out far ahead of most if not all.

What does productivity have to do with people's choice of working or not? We were discussing whether people need encouraging to go to work or not. Productivity is a completely different metric, impacted by many other things.

Productivity is a part of the metric which you base that decision on. Do people need encouragement == will we produce 'enough' with less encouragement || is the long term reduction in production, and it's effect on future generations worth the increase in leisure time now.

I think he meant people without income.

https://twitter.com/worldonalert/status/1258084801636184065

"There is no winning play."

That's by design. There's no winning play for the line worker, because providing one reduces the returns for the investors. If it wasn't already obvious before this, the corona response by the US has thrown into sharp relief how stacked the deck is - from top to bottom - against the common worker.

I mean, the name of the economic system is pretty blatant. "Capitalism" is exactly what it says on the tin, and it's pretty unbridled in the US, to its own detriment (long-term), IMO.

I can't speak about California specifically, but in Canada, if it can be reasonably be proven that the illness was obtained at the workplace, the employer is required to pay for the sick leave by the local health benefits service (State/Provincial/Federal level), which in this case would be two weeks.

The employer can fight the filing, but in the situation of COVID-19, it's reasonably easy to prove it was a workplace based infection (multiple people will get sick).

Side note, when you get payments from the local health benefits service, there's a %90 chance it's being paid by the employer to the health benefits service, which then transfers it to the employee

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