Making you sick.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Lack of paid sick leaves for restaurant industr workers

Here's something to make you sick: Corporations and their Republican water boys are denying people the paid leave they need to get well.

Ill workers often spread illness, because millions of employees who deal directly with the public are not covered by paid sick leave policies. So, when they come down with something like stomach flu, they tend to drag themselves to work, rather than going to bed until they recover, since staying home means a loss of pay ... or even the loss of their jobs.

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Low-wage workers in the restaurant industry are particularly vulnerable and, since they handle food, particularly threatening. Roughly 80 percent of America's food service workers receive no paid sick leave, and about half of them go to work ill. They are causing up to 80 percent of Americas stomach flu outbreaks, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's one reason CDC has declared our country's lack of paid sick leave to be a major public health threat.

You'd think the industry itself would be horrified enough by this endangerment of its customers that it would take the obvious curative step of providing the leave. But, au contraire, amigos, such huge and hugely profitable chains as McDonald's, Red Lobster, and Taco Bell not only fail to provide such commonsense care for their employees, but also have lobbied furiously against city and state efforts to require paid sick days, as Mother Jones reported.

Ironically, the top corporate executives of these chains (who are not involved in preparing or serving food to the public) are protected with full sick leave policies. For them to deny it to workers is idiotic, dangerously shortsighted--and even mote sickening than stomach flu.

But what about our lawmakers? Where's the leadership we need on this basic issue of fairness and public health? To paraphrase an old bumper sticker: When the people lead, leaders will follow. Or not.

Not when the "leaders" are in the pocket of corporate interests that don't like where the people are leading.

Take Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who never met a corporate pocket too grungy to climb into. This story starts in 2008, when the people of Milwaukee took the...