Providing sick days and keeping abuse down to a dull roar

Millions of workers in the United States of America have no paid sick days. A large portion have no sick days at all. Get sick twice in a month, and you're fired.

Employers who don't provide sick days, and many who do, complain about the cost and the rampant abuse. Like any good thing, sick days can and will be abused. There is a sense of entitlement: this is part of my pay and benefits package, so I must use up my sick days.

That sense of entitlement is not entirely unjustified either. If an employer amortizes estimated cost of sick days when determining the total package they will agree to in collective bargaining, then the amortized cost will NOT be in your paycheck, so the way to get the benefit of it is... to take your sick days!

As a former union shop steward, I have a plan. Most traditional unions would not even consider it. Many rank and filed employees would reject it out of hand too. But, it might bring the benefits of sick days to millions who lack them now - and who can't get any sick days at all, via weak unions or no union at all, from intransigent managers and employers.

There are good reasons for paid sick days. An employee who has none will drag themselves to work if they possibly can. Managers think that is a good incentive to weed out slackers. But it also means, workers will show up woozy, inattentive, perhaps nauseous or with a wobbly sense of balance.

Safety is impaired, with implications for workers comp costs, lawsuits and settlements with clients, not to mention infections spreading to other employees, some of whom will then be unable to work. Still, it is true that if an employee has a base pay of $13 an hour, works a ten-hour four-day week, gets ten paid sick days a year, and uses them all, the cost to the employer is the same as raising wages by 62.5 cents an hour.

Doing this right requires a careful balance of incentives. Suppose every employee is given the option to select from two to ten sick days for the year. One half the cost of these sick days is amortized over the year and deducted from the employee's paycheck. If the cost is $1300 per year, and pay is biweekly, that would be $1300 / 26 /2 = $25 out of every biweekly paycheck. The other half of all sick days is paid by the employer.

At the end of the year, the employee can make the same choice again, BUT all unused sick days are rolled over. So, if only five days were used, and the employee opts to keep ten available, only $12.50 is deducted from each paycheck over the next year.

This provides a reasonable incentive not to use the sick days unless necessary. It provides the assurance that a given week's paycheck will not be short if an employee who is sick stays home (or, in the case of an ill child, stays home to provide necessary care). It shares the financial burden, without letting the employer off the hook.

In fact, the employer has some incentive to promote employee health -- and had a financial incentive to allow a sick employee to stay home, so there aren't MORE employees catching an illness, staying home, and collecting sick pay.

A really enlightened employer might also offer that employees who use less than half their sick days in a year get a day's pay as an annual bonus, or two days for not using any sick days at all.

Neither employers nor unions show much of this kind of creative thinking. None of us are angels, few of us are devils (a few employers come close), and none of us are heroes all the time. Solidarity forever is a worthy cause, but some unions figure they spend 40 percent of their money fulfilling a legal obligation to defend people who darned well ought to be fired.

Let's all open up a little. There will always be the nagging doubt that the company is making millions while denying workers enough to take proper care of their families. More often than not, this is a justified doubt, and powerful unions can help to dispel it by forcing management to loosen up.

But as Chris Hani, the late General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, said in a speech to that country's Chamber of Commerce, the redistribution we need should not be the kind where we kill the cow and distribute the meat. We need some long term thinking, outside the box, on what will produce, and continue to produce.

The exercise of personal choice under the compulsion of losing your job...

My good friend Gary Fouse out in Orange County, California, has asked me to acknowledge the negative impact of unions. He likes to focus on thuggery, which in my opinion is a bit misplaced. But a more mundane problem is that traditional union work rules can indeed deny individual workers flexibility they really would prefer to have, and also interfere with legitimate managerial initiatives.

There is a reason for traditional union work rules. About two hundred years ago, production which had been performed by independent crafts men (they were almost all men) was taken over by the rise of large industrial enterprises. The new methods produced far more, with less labor per item, making all kinds of goods available at a lower cost. In the long run, it contributed to general prosperity. Sort of.

Both the craftsmen newly rendered into wage laborers, and the gentlemen investors inventing the role of employers of large scale wage labor teams, looked to existing law and social custom to define their roles. Craftsmen demanded autonomy, and respect for their craft. Employers, who thought of themselves as MASTERS, tried to treat their employees as dependents and inferiors, albeit sometimes with a certain paternal noblesse oblige.

When adult citizens need to "get a job" to support themselves and their families, while a smaller number of adult citizens possess the wealth to invest capital, and the power to hire and fire, equal citizenship ceases to exist. When discretion is left up to owners and managers, it can and will be abused. Even seemingly reasonable decisions will be made according to the best interests of management, ignoring the best interests, or even the necessities, of employees.

A good example: a mother whose child is sick must take them to the hospital or the doctor. But, an employer who needs employees to be at work, on time, every day, simply cannot accommodate that, or won't. The operator of a pumpkin farm entertaining tours of school children might tell the secretary to go home until her child is well, and cover the post. The manager of a transport company might callously issue a final written warning.

Standardized union work rules define a baseline of rights that an employee is entitled to. Seniority isn't a great way to promote, but if "merit" or "talent" are the basis of promotion, the boss will decide what they want to recognize at "merit." It may be the brown-noser who gets the raise, or keeps their job during a lay-off, or the female employee who is willing to put out. To this day, in most states, absent specific legislation or union contract, a wage employee can be fired "for any reason or no reason." It's called "employment at will."

But if a way could be found to limit arbitrary and capricious action by management, while also allowing flexibility to both worker and owner, it could be a big improvement. Unfortunately, anything left up to the "choice" of a woman or man who "needs a job" can be quickly turned into "voluntarily agree to this, or we will not hire / will fire you."

Eulogos and the Constitution of the United States of America

A converted Roman Catholic blogger who goes by the name of Eulogos, but has openly used her legal name as well, recently posted in a discussion at Red Cardigan that "When I became a Catholic I said 'I Susan Peterson, enlightened by divine grace, and touching with my hand these Holy Gospels, profess the faith which the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church teaches. I believe that Church to be the one true Church which Jesus Christ established on earth, to which I adhere with all my heart'."

She went on to profess belief in the infallibility of the Pope, seven sacraments, the Apostles Creed, and ended her profession of faith with "And anything else which She (The Catholic Church) defines and declares I do believe, and I renounce every heresy and schism which She condemns."

I don't believe a word of it. Where I live in space and time, that confers on me no civil disability. Ms. Peterson, I assume, sincerely believes every word, which confers no civil disability on her. We can both vote, run for office, own property, we pay the same taxes and have the same access to government services. We can each live in any neighborhood each of us can afford. There the matter might rest, were it not for the evangelical impulse which animates the Christian faith, and the claim to supremacy over civil authority which is often generated by belief in the infallibility of the Pope.

One romishgraffiti adds a citation from that church's current Catechism:

2089. Incredulity is the neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to assent to it. Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same; apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith; schism is the refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.

I cheerfully and openly embrace schism and heresy by those definitions. (From what I've heard, listening to those who have studied Greek, "heresy" originally meant party or faction, to the entire Vatican edifice is, ipso facto, heresy. Accepted doctrine is merely the heresy in power at the moment.) I cannot plead nolo contendere to apostasy, although a Roman Catholic definition of "the Christian faith" would undoubtedly condemn me of that as well. I plead not guilty to incredulity only by clinging to my own understanding of what is, and is not, revealed truth. Again, a proper Roman definition could no doubt convict me.

If the canon romishgraffiti cites applies only to those who have, like Susan Peterson, freely and voluntarily confessed the Roman Catholic faith, then that canon is none of my business, and I need think no more about it. If it is asserted that this canon applies to me, then it is my privilege to abjure, renounce, and condemn it.

There has always been a conflict between democratic governance, particularly in the absence of an Established Church, and assertions of Absolute Truth by a religious faith. This conflict is by no means limited to the Roman Catholic Church, nor is that church itself free from charges of heresy and schism.

A most amusing contribution to Rod Dreher's discussion of "Is the Protestant Reformation ending?" was an observation that "The Protestant Reformation will never end until the Roman Catholic Church returns to Holy Orthodoxy, because the Pope is the first Protestant." How so? The Bishop of Rome put his individual pronouncements above the collegial leadership of the patriarchs, who recognized his office as first among equals, but not as the ultimate or sole source of authority. Historically, theologically, and doctrinally, is is more than arguable that the Orthodox church is "the one true Church established by Christ and his Apostles," if indeed any church is, and the Roman church a late-breaking offshoot.

In more recent times, the distant offspring of the Protestant Reformation have rebelled against the separation between church and state, that was inspired by their own forefathers (and mothers), demanding immediate political manifestation of Paul's promise that "every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord."

Protestants should know better. When Alexis de Toqueville visited the United States during the 1830s, he noted the profusion of churches, and active participation they inspired by a large part of the population, compared to Europe. Unanimously, any pastor of any church he asked told him the reason was the separation of church and state. The church thrived when freed from what James Madison called "the profane hand of the civil magistrate."

Today, the broadly secular nature of European life and culture are widely bemoaned by the Pope and by evangelical American Protestants alike. The emptiness of churches in Europe can be traced directly to the long history of officially Established churches dependent upon the subsidy of whatever government might be in power. The continued vitality of churches in the United States is the direct result of having no such unholy bonds.

Roman Catholics also benefited, as the Baltimore Catechism used to sternly remind each new generation. There were a few colonists practicing the Roman Catholic faith at the time of the American Revolution, many of whom became active patriots. Although the colonies had a history of brutal persecution of Catholics, both inherited from English politics and inspired by hatred of the rampant Spanish persecution of Protestants and Jews, Catholic patriots were fully accepted into the common cause.

Those early, post-colonial, Catholics adhered to the rituals and theology of their church, but Rome was far away across the broad Atlantic Ocean. Communication took weeks if not months. The Curia seldom paid much attention to affairs in the former British colonies. Besides, there were few enough of them.

There was always an undercurrent in the Roman Church of "OK, since the place is mostly Protestant, freedom of religion is best for us, but when we get a chance, we will restore the supremacy of Our Church." There was always an undercurrent of fear among American Protestants that, indeed, Catholic immigration would lead to the destruction of our secular republic.

It cost Al Smith the presidency in 1928. It was an issue John F. Kennedy laid to rest by affirming that if the electorate offered him the honor of taking an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," with his hand on the Bible, it would be an offense against God to break that oath. Sincere Roman supremacists bitterly denounced him for that concession.

Christians who, similar to even the most Orthodox of Jews, are willing to wait patiently for God to establish His Kingdom as he sees fit, in his own good time, have no need to challenge the separation of church and state. One can join with Abraham Lincoln in asserting that "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," but acknowledge that "Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

Those who preach religious supremacy, whether Orthodox, Roman, Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Jewish, Muslim or Pentecostal, must honestly come to terms with what they really mean to offer their neighbors: the hand of friendship, silent contempt, or the sword. American law fully recognizes the autonomy of any church in governing its own internal affairs, in matters of faith and doctrine, even of church property. Those who claim the unwilling obedience of noncommunicants are enemies of freedom, and of their noncommunicant fellow citizens.

If the doctrine of any church is ambiguous as to the jurisdiction claimed, it is the duty of adherents to clarify exactly what they mean, and say so honestly to all the world. The world will, of course, respond in kind: by their fruits do we know them.