Lack of Paid Sick Days May Worsen Flu Pandemic

“We were sending 12 and 15 kids home a day with fever,” she said. “The next day they’d be back. They’d say, ‘I still feel bad. I still have a fever.’ So we’d ask, ‘Why are you back here?’ And they’d say, ‘because Mommy had to work.’ ”

A survey last year by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that 68 percent of those not eligible for paid sick days said they had gone to work with a contagious illness like the flu, while 53 percent eligible for paid sick days said they had done so.

That survey found that 11 percent of respondents said that they had lost a job for taking off for an illness for themselves or a family member, and 13 percent said they had been told they would be fired or suspended if they missed work because of personal or family illness.

Ricardo Copantitla, a food server at Thalassa, a restaurant in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan, said he called in sick last year when he had the seasonal flu, not H1N1.

“The restaurant said you have to come to work, because they were short of people,” he said. “I had a bad cough, and I felt tired and terrible. But I went to work because I feared being fired.”

Thalassa did not respond to phone and e-mail requests for comment.

Like many restaurant chains, White Castle, which runs 421 hamburger restaurants nationwide, says it takes H1N1 seriously.

“Our policy is that when team members experience illness, we require that they stay home until they are feeling better,” said Jamie Richardson, White Castle’s vice president for corporate relations. “Our policy provides for time off as people need it.”

White Castle does not provide paid sick days, he acknowledged, but he said that workers who stayed home sick would not suffer lost pay because they could work extra hours after recovering.

Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, said H1N1 had spurred an attitude shift throughout corporate America.

“Before, people looked askance at absenteeism — someone staying out was a problem to the company,” she said. “There was this view that being sick was malingering. But now if someone comes in sick — and there has been subtle pressure to do this — you worry that you can get something very dangerous. You worry that you could bring it home to your children, to your elderly parent, to your husband or wife."