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B4 THE DAVIS ENTERPRISE
Commentary Stopping pay for workers sick with COVID is misguided
By Stephen Knight Special to CalMatters
During the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, California became the nation’s leader in protecting vulnerable workers by adopting emergency rules to prevent spread of COVID at work, and ensuring that workers who were infected could stay home to get well and prevent further spread. But just as we are facing the most contagious strains yet, a key element of these temporary rules is set to expire in a few short months.
Incredibly, California’s workplace safety officials are considering keeping in place the requirement to keep positive COVID cases out of the workplace, but throwing out the requirement to pay workers excluded from the workplace when sick (“exclusion pay”). Protecting public health — and maintaining California’s national leadership — depend on the state making permanent these rules to protect workers.
The economic analysis the state has relied upon to support this dangerous path fails to account for the costs borne by families, businesses and the public when this critical safety measure disappears. Reporting of symptoms and of close contacts will be severely reduced when workers understand that they or their coworkers will be put out of work.
If exclusion pay is allowed to expire, workplaces such as kitchens, warehouses and meatpacking plants will be the most affected. Low-wage and marginalized workers in particular again will be forced into Sophie’s choice: Miss a paycheck your family is counting on for rent and food, or go to work knowing you could spread the virus to more families.
More than 10 million Californians have gotten sick from COVID, and 93,000 have died. Study after study is documenting the dramatic inequality in health outcomes — almost seven of every 10 COVID-19 deaths during the first year were among low-income adults, mostly essential workers of color. This disparity is shocking and unacceptable.
The COVID workplace rules undoubtedly prevented even worse outcomes. These commonsense measures include requiring a COVID-19 prevention program for every workplace and training employees on prevention. Workers are encouraged to bring COVID-19 hazards to an employer’s attention to be fixed. When face coverings are required by the state Department of Public Health, the employer must provide them.
Perhaps most importantly, if an employee gets COVID on the job, she is to stay home from work, her job is protected and she must be paid for the brief period until she is well and can safely return.
Legislators are considering extending the state’s Supplemental Paid Sick Leave law, which is expiring in September, and they should extend this critical benefit. Still, this won’t take the place of exclusion pay, which is specific to work-related COVID cases and is crucial to preventing additional workplace exposures. Paid sick leave covers a broader set of reasons a person may need to be out of work, including child care and caring for a sick relative. Both are critical to our defenses against COVID-19 over the long term.
During this third summer of living with COVID, many of us have stepped out of our secure bubbles, venturing into travel, social events and a sense of normalcy. The new waves of ultracontagious variants of the virus crashing on our state should caution us that this sense of normalcy is fragile. Only by adapting our workplace rules to our new, more dangerous and uncertain reality can we ensure California doesn’t slip back into wide-scale shutdowns and devastatingly unequal health effects.
Nowhere is that more important than in California’s workplaces, where frontline and low-income workers remain the most vulnerable to exposure and illness. — Stephen Knight is the executive director of Worksafe, a nonprofit that advocates for safe and healthy workplaces. He wrote this for CalMatters, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s Capitol works and why it matters. It’s taken years to happen. But polls, tea leaf readings, constituent complaints and recall petitions at long last have this state’s dominant liberal Democrats realizing they must listen to the voters rather than trying to impose their will exclusively.
This comes after repeated resistance. Only when voters by large margins in the last two years cancelled laws passed in Sacramento to institute statewide rent control and eliminate cash bail did signs appear that elected Democrats were beginning to realize the mass of California voters is not quite as “progressive” as they once thought.
It’s true, the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom went nowhere, in large part because of the hopeless list of candidates who sought to replace him.
But even the ousted District Attorney Chesa Boudin of San Francisco, long an advocate of soft-on-crime tactics like attempts at rehabilitation over punishment for major crimes and a presumption that no one is truly evil, changed his tune a little before the June 7 vote that threw him out of office.
Staring at that recall in the wake of last fall’s spate of “smash-and-grab” flash mob burglaries and robberies, Boudin declared that “We want everyone to feel safe” and announced plans to charge the perpetrators with felonies, not misdemeanors.
That was a huge change from his stances during and after his 2019 election. Boudin began running very scared after his city’s voters recalled three ultra-liberal, “woke” school board members who wanted to remove the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein from local schools.
Things are looking the same in Los Angeles, where Boudin predecessor George Gascon is now district attorney and watching the count of signatures in an effort to recall him.
One of Gascon’s first acts after moving south from San Francisco and getting elected D.A. in 2020 was to forbid his almost 1,000 deputies ever to try juveniles as adults, no matter how serious their crimes. But now Gascon says prosecutors can apply to him or his top assistant to do just that. The new policy applies to current juvenile suspects and also to adults who allegedly committed significant crimes while under 18.
This followed outrage when a transgender woman, formerly a male, received a mere two-year sentence for child molesting and then was taped gloating about it to her father.
Gascon said he was revolted by the tape, but line prosecutors said the recording was widely known in his office for a month before he altered his policy. So they wonder if his switch came after polls revealed crime and homelessness as the new the top issues for California voters even as Gascon recall signatures piled up.
Meanwhile, appointed state Attorney General Rob Bonta, long a supporter of the 2014 Proposition 47 (which turned many former felonies into mere misdemeanors and has seen thousands of perpetrators freed soon after their arrests) and of ending cash bail, has traveled the state talking tough on crime ever since the actually tough-on-crime Sacramento D.A. Anne Marie Schubert ran an independent campaign to unseat him.
Schubert failed, but plainly had an impact on Bonta.
Then there’s Newsom. Although his reelection could not be much safer after he decisively beat back last September’s recall, the governor reads the polls, too, including private surveys taken for his campaign.
He has made the fight against homelessness a staple for the last six months, traveling to most parts of the state and handing out billions of dollars to build shelters and other new housing for the homeless, plus buying up hotels and motels and converting them to permanent housing for people living in parks and on sidewalks.
Public reaction to the homeless scene and the criminal element among this population caused Newsom’s job approval rating to fall below 50 percent last winter in one major poll for the first time since his 2018 election.
That seemed to spur him to new tough-on-crime rhetoric.
These changed approaches by Democrats show a willingness to adjust when political survival is at stake.
Perhaps this state’s impotent Republican Party, which never seems to adjust to political reality, could learn something from that. — Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a softcover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.
Letters
Healthcare priorities
I can’t thank Marilú Carter enough for her timely data-driven explanation of the current state of our health care system which has become for me, as for so many others, a nonstop headache (a condition which, by the way, may or may not be covered, pre-authorized or pre-approved, medically necessary, and the prescribed medication may or may not be available and treatment will likely be charged way more than the published benefit amount). Fortunately I am retired so I have time to educate myself and advocate for my health care, unlike working families who can’t spend hours on the telephone being transferred around from provider to insurer and back again.
This is yet another example of privatization and corporatization: private equity “investments” in health care centers and hospitals-commodifying another essential quality-of-life basic need.
Good to know that the CEO of Centene (parent company who “owns” my private commercial Medicare Advantage Plan) received $20.6 million in bonuses last year: High profits due to high patient privation/denials/delays of service and reimbursements: A simple but effective and lucrative profit-making business plan.
Kate MacLaren
Davis
Thank you, Democrats!
Dear Congressional Democrats;
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! You passed the recent Inflation Reduction Bill which will finally address Climate Change, medical and pharmacy costs, and a variety of other issues such as funding the IRS, paying for black-lung disease of miners, and making billion-dollar corporations pay a minimum tax!
More to do, but a great start. I see the promise of greater social and economic justice, and I can sleep better at night knowing that we are starting to deal seriously with Climate Change. Thank you, Congressional Democrats!
But we have work to do: Traditionally midterm elections in November don’t favor the political party in power, so Democratic candidates in California and throughout the nation need our help. Please join the Sister District Yolo group (www.sisterdistrictyolo.org), Indivisible Yolo (indivisibleyolo.org), or another group of your choosing — which all offer many ways to get involved to fit your interests.
We may be single individuals, but working together we can make a difference.
Laurie Friedman
Davis
Mar-a-Lago raid conundrum
The FBI’s Aug. 8 raid of Donald Trump’s property at Mar-a-Lago is a reassuring reminder that under democratic systems with healthy rules of law, no one is above the law.
Unfortunately, the raid was simultaneously a cautionary reminder that the Achilles’ heel of democratic systems is the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.
The particular danger stemming from the Mar-a-Lago raid is that going forward presidents will worry more that by voluntarily giving up power, they might be subjecting themselves, their families, and their prominent allies, to legal prosecutions by the incoming administration.
Because of our sharp partisan divide, and its extension to news and social media, it probably will not matter much whether such prosecutions are justified or whether they are politically motivated and unjustified.
Donald Trump’s words and actions over the past six years have placed the Biden administration’s Justice Department in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. Unfortunately, the result is that both democracy and the rule of law were bound to suffer whichever path the Justice Department chose to take.
Andrew Majeske
Davis
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The Hon. Joe Biden, The White House, Washington, D.C., 20500; 202-456-1111 (comments), 202-456-1414 (switchboard); email: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact
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Rep. John Garamendi (3rd District), 2368 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C., 20515; 202-225-1880. District office: 412 G St., Davis, CA 95616; 530-753-5301; email: visit https://garamendi.house.gov/contact/ email
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