The Sick Day May Be Over for At-Home Workers

if I can work, I'll work. Katherine Dill, reporter at The Wall Street Journal, joins us for Americans complicated relationship with taking time off. Thanks for joining us, Katherine, my pleasure. Let's talk about the sick day. It seems to be going by the wayside now, at least for remote workers. In some cases, we're seeing all the disruptions obviously that's going on because of COVID nineteen. With this Amicron variant,

what we're seeing is a lot of more milder infections. Thankfully, you know that's not across the board, but that's what we're finding out is happening a lot of times. And if you're work from home, you know you're obviously already away from the office. You don't have to worry about infecting coworkers things like that. So a lot of people are opting to just say, hey, you know, it's not so bad, I'll work through the day, or even managers facing shortages are even asking their employees if you can

work if you're not so sick. You know, maybe maybe hop on a few calls or a few meetings or something. So Catherine, tell us what's going on with the sick day right now. Certainly, well, if this is something we were seeing a little bit of before the pandemic, folks had a few more options for if they were sick, and it gave them a little bit of pause to

think about coming in. And you know, everybody's had that experience of sitting next to the person who's just like hacking away during the work day at their death, but you know they're putting in their time. And so this was changing a little bit before the pandemic. But then with the onset of of COVID, calling your boss and saying I've tested positive for COVID was away for some

workers to actually be able to check out. Certainly they were also feeling sick, but it was a way for folks to say you know, like I have to go back to bed, I have to rest, I need a sick day. With omicron, what we're seeing is that lots of people are sick at the same time right now because of the extremely high case count, but many people, because of rising vaccination rates and boosters, are experiencing much much milder cases. And that can still mean you feel ill,

but it's not necessarily debilitating. And so we see lots of folks choosing to work through the day. You know, a few people we talked to you said, there's not much to do when you're an adult who's maybe you know, isolated part of your house, away from your kids or your family. Um, some people chose to work. Others felt cracker. And of course a lot of employers, as you set, are facing worker shortages. So the incentive to continue plugging away is high. Now we've talked a lot about this

for a long time now. Americans have this weird relationship with working. Uh, you know, becomes people identities. You feel like you have to work all the time. You know, this compared to other countries, let's say, and the Americans and notorious for not taking time off. I mean I think, uh, some of the stats that we have, a quarter of you paid time off was left on the table for a lot of Americans sick days to just people aren't taking all the available sick time that they have. And

this is kind of a pre pandemic thing, right. People would often just go to work even though they had a mild cold or something and just work through it. But this is that complicated relationship that we have with taking time off, you know, as you said, this is something that Americans are known for being really bad at.

And it's true across the board on types of paid time off, you know, as you said, like Americans left a lot of vacation time on the table even before the pandemic, and certainly we saw even more vacation go unused because there was also the thinking about, like, well, what am I'm not supposed to go anywhere or do anything. It's not safe, so what am I going to do

with this time off? But it's true also with sick time, we see Americans sort of reluctant to take discrete days that they have that are satisfied for illness when they need them. I should coveyat this by saying that lots of Americans do not receive paid sick days, So we are talking about folks who have the option and just aren't taking it. Yeah, I mean that's an important distinction, right, people who have the option of having the paid sick time,

people who have the option of remote work. You know, we there's a lot of people that don't have that luxury obviously, and if they get sick, you know, the way current rules are said, you know, you have to stay away from people so you don't get others infected. So definitely, you know, a very specific thing we're talking about. But what would doctors and health experts say about even working at home while you're sick. I mean, you might not feel so bad, but the body does still need

to rest things like that, Yes, exactly. You know, the sense is if this is something that's going to help you deal, you know, if you feel well enough that working seems like an option that will help you fill your time while you're sitting out a quarantine. Fine, but you do need time to recover, especially with some of like the omicron Darry. You know, we're seeing symptoms manifests or differently in different people and the onset sometimes it

is a little bit later for some people. And so the medical consensus does seem to be, you know, like you need the time, you need the time to rest and recover. That being said, we talked to a lot of workers who felt that they had flexibility. You know, they could say, I got up in the morning and I felt pretty good, so I said, you know, I sent some females, maybe I hopped on a call, maybe

I got a few things done. But then as my energy started to flag, or I got dizzy or something like that, I just took a nap, or you know, I went to bed for the rest of the day, or I had a rest. And so we we see we see workers taking advantage of that sort of new quote unquote flexibility around this too. And that's such an important thing, right because what if people are relying on you, then midwood day you do feel bad, you know, then

it just causes all these other problems. It's like, well, you should have took the sick day to begin with. And you know, you spoke to a teacher, a substitute teacher um who said, hey, we went to remote learning. I was sick. I said, let's do the classes. Anyways, we're remote and uh, even by the end of his session. You know, he said he was falling asleep on camera almost, so it still could be you know, caused an issue with trying to work through the day without having to

take the sick time. It's not ideal. So only you know this, this flexibility is more available to some workers

than others. So like, if you have an office job and some autonomy and you can't sort of block out your time with things like sending emails, are dipping in and out of a meeting or doing a quick check in or something like that, this is going to work for you a lot better than for someone like the example in the story that the substitute teacher who was worried there wouldn't be anyone even to replace him and needed he needed to be on zoom all day teaching classes.

That flexibility is not going to be available to him, and the way it would be to somebody with a different job. Well, just an interesting look at what's going on. You know, when the pandemic was happening, people were saying, hey, you know, this is a good thing that people are actually taking the time to take the sick time and get better. But now with the remote work and all this stuff, we're going back to our old ways in a sense by working through the day anyway, So we'll

see how it all pans out. Katherine Dill, reporter at the Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks. I'm Oscar Romeris and this is in reopening America. Don't forget different today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday. So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.