In Low-Wage Jobs, Working While Black Means Showing Up Sick

By Jennifer Porter Gore, Word in Black

A temporary federal law during COVID gave low-wage workers paid sick leave. But the law expired, forcing a huge chunk of Black workers to clock in when they should stay home.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed a temporary law that allowed employees, who are disproportionately Black and Latino, to claim up to two weeks of paid sick leave for pandemic-related illness. For the first time, low-wage workers had access to sick leave for themselves or to care for loved ones. 

Eight years earlier, several states and the District of Columbia had enacted laws requiring employers to allow workers to earn paid sick time. However, the pandemic revealed how much the lack of paid sick days still affected thousands of hourly workers and many states and localities began offering some type of paid time off for illness.

But an economic analysis — coupled with the demographics of states that haven’t expanded sick leave to hourly workers — found that swaths of Black workers have to come to work even if they are sick.

“During the pandemic, workers and their families benefited when the government acted quickly to protect workers from the threat of COVID and the threat of economic insecurity,” according to the report from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Forcing people to come to work when they’re sick, the report states, is a public health hazard and harms the economy.

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