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Family Values?
Family Values?The attorney interviewed for last week's business feature hit some of the prominent notes of the alarm being sounded across the country of late: We are turning into a socialist state.
Really?
Stop by the Times-Democrat office these days, where three of our staff members are in or approaching the third trimester of their pregnancies, and you may find a different opinion.
If they lived in Sweden, our pregnant contingent recently learned, they'd be in line for 18 months of maternity leave paid at 80 percent of their salaries. The trio wasn't particularly delighted at their comparative situation.
Sweden is likely the most generous country on the planet when it comes to maternity leave, though almost all other developed nations — and even many that are not — put the United States and our 12 weeks of unpaid leave, to absolute shame.
Worldwide, paid and unpaid maternity and parental leaves average about 18 months, according to Child Policies International. The average paid leave is 16 weeks, and in about half of the 128 countries that mandate maternity benefits, paid leave means 100 percent of wages.
Our three expectant mothers are now joined by the rest of us in puzzlement over other shortfalls of U.S. social policies.
The U.S., unlike 139 of the world's other nations, doesn't have a national sick-leave policy.
Nearly half of U.S. workers don't get any paid sick leave, and the lower you go on the pay scale, the less likely you are to have it.
Compounding that shortfall, the number of sick-leave days that companies voluntarily provide is now about half what it was just five or six years ago, according to human resource experts.
That's a bit of a problem, given that the Center for Disease Control is strongly urging those who develop flu-like symptoms to stay home from work for seven days after the onset of illness, or a minimum of 24 hours after symptoms have resolved, whichever is longer.
The number of sick folks who will stay home for a week will be regrettably low.
Who can afford it? In this economy, who feels secure enough in his or her job to risk an absence of that length?
Most of the rest of us will be guilty of "presenteeism" — showing up, even if we don't feel well enough to get much done in the way of work.
That's not the best plan for dealing with a possible pandemic.
Thus our parsimony in social programs becomes a public health problem. If H1N1 flu symptoms worsen, perhaps it even becomes a public health nightmare.
Stay home if you are ill. Do it for yourself. Do it for the rest of us.
Apparently, this is a real opportunity to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
And while you're home recovering, unpaid, worried about your job, consider whether a little turn to the left on some of our social policies is really such a frightening idea after all.
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