New York City Paid Sick Days

      New York City Paid Sick Days

    In the article, The Structure of Social Institutions, Anderson and Collins posit that the idea of the institution is an abstract one because an institution cannot be underlined as an absolute thing, but rather that an institution is an established set of social patterns that occur for certain social purposes.  What Anderson and Collins underscore in their discussion of the structure of the institution, is a particularly unique power that a set of organized patterns revolving around a purpose hold in a society.  A unique power in fact, when linked to the possibility that they can be rendered anonymous, when, the very idea of the institution is held in the abstract because of the potential inability to be considered in absolute terms.

     In March of this year, the New York City Council voted to require employers with more than 20 employees to provide five paid sick days per year for employee illness.  This requirement takes effect in 2014.  The positive effects of having five sick days a year could provide to the individual in the City of New York are endless.  Many of the intersections of race, gender and class that we have contemplated, ultimately rest in a challenging relationship with the economics of the workplace.  San Francisco, Portland, Oregon and Seattle all have sick day policies that protect the idea of worker’s health and much of the press that surrounds the discussion of sick days in New York City points to the potential for paid sick days on a national level.

    The most important effect that paid sick day legislation on a local or national level can have is to re-establish the way that we organize and think about the relationship of the employer and the employee in the workplace.  Right before Spring Break on of my classmates in another class was so ill that she was hospitalized with a severe ear infection for two days.  Prior to becoming ill she worked two part-time jobs.  On the day that she went to the emergency room, as she was leaving her morning job as a barista, her supervisor told her that if she left she would not have a job to come back to.  Under the 2014 paid sick time provisions, she would have had the ability to call out sick and be paid for it, but in addition to her benefits, her employer would be thinking about sick time in a different way.  Instead of being sick as something that is lacking, as my classmates employer viewed it, it is something that the employer is responsible for making whole. 

     Ultimately, through the legislation providing for payment of sick days, we have organized ourselves and our reactions to what it means to be sick in a different way.  The relationship of what it means to be an employer in relation to being sick is different and the relationship to being sick as an employee is different.  We have structurally changed the way the institution organizes the idea of illness in relation to the means of production.

Below is a link to two different view points regarding paid sick days in New York City; a business perspective and a worker's perspective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnVwexY0tig

References.

Deal Reached to Force Paid Sick Leave in New York City, March 28, 2013.  The New York Times.

The Structure of Social Institutions.  Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins

Youtube videos