Business Commons^™

Paid Sick Time: An Essential Benefit For All Of Minnesota's Workers, Leah Hanson, Caitlin Kemp, Carrie Leggett

Master of Social Work Student Policy Advocacy Briefs

Paid sick time is an essential benefit for all workers in Minnesota. Paid sick time is an economic issue, a public health issue, and an equity issue. Workers should not have to choose between going to work sick or losing a day of pay. Low wage workers, women, Black, Indigenous, people of color, and people living in rural areas are least likely to work at jobs that provide paid sick time. Three cities in Minnesota have implemented paid sick time for workers, along with twelve States and the District of Columbia. It is time for Minnesota to act now and …

Pandemics, Paid Sick Leaves, And Tax Institutions, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently ravaging the world, and the United States has been largely unsuccessful at containing the coronavirus. One long-standing policy failure stands out as having exacerbated the pandemic in our country: the lack of a national mandate of paid sick leaves, without which workers face financial and workplace-cultural pressures to attend work while sick, thus spreading the virus to their fellow employees and the public at large.

This Article provides the blueprint for a national, subsidized mandate of paid sick leaves and two additional insights about our tax institutions as mechanisms of effectuating broader societal goals. It …