Mandatory sick leave: It's not just Philadelphia

City Council approved a mandatory sick leave bill yesterday—Mayor Nutter has promised a veto. But Philadelphia isn't the only place this debate is playing out: Connecticut just passed a law, and several other states and cities are considering it. That's why Ben and I tackle the issue in our Scripps Howard column this week. My take:

Here is what opponents of paid sick leave apparently desire: that you enter a local restaurant for a delicious meal prepared by a flu-ridden cook who can't afford to take the day off -- or else her own kids might have to do without a meal of their own. Enjoy your Virus Burger, folks!

Hyperbolic? A little. But the reason the sick-leave moment exists is that many low-paid workers often have to choose between working sick -- or leaving sick children at home -- or losing desperately needed income.

Business owners are understandably concerned that such a requirement would cut into their revenues, and possibly make it impossible to do business. Their concerns are fueled by studies that exaggerate the potential costs by assuming -- implausibly -- that workers would take every possible day of sick leave. An additional underlying belief is that businesses see little or no benefit from offering such benefits to their employees.

Neither belief is warranted. In Connecticut, for example, the Economic Policy Institute discovered that employees who already had access to five paid sick days took off just 2.41 of those days.

And while advocates for paid sick leave say that a national law would cost businesses $20.2 billion, those same businesses would reap $28.4 billion by reducing job turnover and lost productivity from workers who show up ill and can't properly perform their duties.

In these dark economic times, policymakers understandably hesitate to add to the burdens of small businesses. It would be nice if government could provide incentives to business to provide sick leave, instead of merely piling on new regulations.

The underlying principle of such proposals is sound, however: Jobs should offer more than a labor opportunity-- they should offer a living.

If that means you eat a hamburger with fewer germs, so much the better.

Ben: "Don't be surprised if unemployment remains high if these bills pass."

Bill Dunkelberg bait-and-switches Inquirer readers about the sick-leave bill

I'm not really decided about the merits of Philadelphia's proposed law to require employers to provide sick leave. I'm instinctively for it, and there's reason to believe it wouldn't have the deleterious effects its opponents suggest. Still, there's a lot of reason to believe it's not easy to do business in Philadelphia, and a lot of that has to do with local government regulation.

But sometimes opponents make such misleading arguments that it gets easier to choose sides. That's the case with today's Inquirer column from Bill Dunkelberg, a professor of economics at Temple University.

Here's how he starts:

Philadelphia universities clearly produce more graduates than we can use, so we "export" them. The Philadelphia region specializes in the production of drugs and graduates (among other things). It is silly to think we could keep most of them.

Graduates will stay only if there are jobs to be had. Yet Philadelphia is hostile to new business creation. The wage tax, the gross-receipts tax, the Department of Licenses and Inspections, and poor city services are just a few of the things that discourage job creation.

Now, City Council wants to put another nail in the job-creation coffin - a requirement that firms provide each employee a "paid sick days" benefit.

There's an implication here that the sick days benefit will chase away Philadelphia's best and brightest—that it will so thoroughly kill the creation of new jobs that folks from Penn, Drexel, Temple, Villanova and all the other universities will have to leave town in greater numbers than they already do.

But does that make sense? If you go by Dunkelberg's examples, I'd say no:

For a small restaurant with 10 employees, paying $10 an hour on average, this could add up to serious dollars. Let's say it creates $7,000 in additional annual expense. To make this up, firms with, for example, a 10 percent profit margin, would need to generate $70,000 in new business to cover the increase in costs.

For the small competitive firms that provide most of our jobs, this is not chump change.

Certainly not, but ask yourself a question: If you're a grad of Penn, Drexel, Temple, or Villanova, is a $10-an-hour restaurant job going to keep you in Philadelphia? In most cases, the answer is no.

In fact, if you think about the types of jobs the majority of those grads will be looking for, one thing is probably self-evident: those jobs probably come with sick leave benefits. Does Comcast make its employees come in with the flu or stay at home without pay? The pharmaceutical companies? The hospitals? That's where a lot of Philadelphia's brightest young workers are going.

In fact, I'd suggest that Dunkelberg uses the $10-an-hour example precisely because those kinds of jobs—physically laborious, low-paying—are actually the kinds of jobs that are targeted by the bill, where sick leave isn't generally offered, and where employees could really use it. These aren't university-grad jobs; in lots of cases they're not even high-school grad jobs.

Dunkelberg is on safer ground when he argues the other possible economic consequences of the bill. (Although his suggestion that Philadelphia workers are itching for an opportunity to rip off their employers is contemptible, as it is when every other opponent makes it.) But Dunkelberg clearly wants you to think that the bill will chase high-education high-wage jobs away from Philadelphia. Since those jobs generally already provide such benefits, that result is unlikely. And Dunkelberg surely knows that.

Would mandatory paid sick days hurt Philadelphia businesses? Maybe not

The Philadelphia City Council is considering a bill that would require the city's employers to offer paid sick leave to their employees—a new regulation that seems, perhaps, counterintuitive considering the poor nature of the job market here. But it turns out that the state of Connecticut is considering similar legislation—and the Economic Policy Institute has a memorandum suggesting the requirement wouldn't be so burdensome, and might offer some benefits to employers.

Among the highlights:

• If all employees used all five paid sick days, the average cost to an employer that currently provides no paid sick days to any employees would be 0.40% of sales.

• Among workers who currently have access to five paid sick days, the industry-weighted average number of days taken is 2.41 days; if employees used this average number of paid sick days, the total cost would be 0.19% of sales.

Says EPI: "The data clearly show that the potential cost of providing paid sick days is in fact extremely small relative to the total sales of a firm. In addition, available research shows cost-savings for employers that provide paid sick days, largely resulting from reduced employee turnover."

It would be interesting to see similar research brought to bear on Philadelphia, but I'm guessing the outlook wouldn't be all that different. In any case, if I were running a business, I'm not sure why I'd want to put my employees in the position of coming to work sick—infecting other employees, my customers, and even me. Based on EPI's memo, such burdens appear unnecessary.

How Should Christians Respond to Gay Behavior They Consider Sinful? A Lapsed Mennonite Replies Awkwardly to Bishop Silva

JOHN 8:

The Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to deny her cake and flowers at her wedding."

Now: Anybody with passing familiarity with the Christian Bible probably can spot right away that this is not a faithful retelling of the incident in John 8. Instead, it’s a telling of scripture as I re-imagined it in light of the law, passed recently in Indiana, allowing shopkeepers to discriminate against gays. My conservative writing/debating partner, Ben Boychuk, has told me on several occasions that my effort was “glib,” but I disagree. Satirical, yes, but considered satire, with a purpose that was quite serious: To suggest that Christians might want to reconsider this issue in light of an age-old question: What Would Jesus Do?

Of all the responses I received — and I continue to receive them, weeks later — none was quite as surprising as my discovery that the Bishop of Honolulu, Larry Silva, took my column and made it the centerpiece of his Sunday homily a few weeks ago. Suffice it to say, he did not agree with my outlook. He deserves to be quoted at length. (And, in fact, I’ll be writing at some length here, so you might as well settle in.)

ObamaCare and the individual mandate

Ben and I wrestle with the lawsuit against the health reform bill in our Scripps Howard column this week. My take:

Let's be clear: Conservatives didn't think the individual mandate was unconstitutional in the 1990s -- when the conservative Heritage Foundation came up with the idea, then pitched it as an alternative to President Bill Clinton's health proposals. No Tea Partiers shouted about "tyranny" just a few years ago, when GOP Gov. Mitt Romney made the requirement a centerpiece of Massachusetts' health law.

While some conservatives sincerely see the mandate as an intolerable infringement upon American freedom, it's not unreasonable to think the GOP is cynically moving the goalposts in its never-ending opposition to Democratic policy ideas -- even if those ideas were originally Republican.

The irony: The mandate was an effort to leave health insurance in the hands of private industry and avoid a true government takeover of the health care system.

During the 2009 debate, after all, many Republicans agreed reform should include a rule that insurance companies couldn't deny coverage to customers with pre-existing conditions. But that left open the likelihood people would wait to get sick before buying insurance -- saddling companies with the costs of sick patients without enough healthy customers to help pay the way. That would've driven the companies into bankruptcy and, in all likelihood, triggered the rise of a government-run "socialized" health insurance system.

So there are good policy reasons for the individual mandate. But as a political matter, many liberals recognize that the mandate is a particularly ugly way to make the sausage of health insurance reform -- more likely to trigger protests against the bill rather than make Americans grateful for the welfare state.

There less-burdensome ways to replace the individual mandate. Insurers could offer financial incentives for early sign-up and penalties for late arrivals, the way parts of Medicare work now. Other, market-friendly ideas abound. But never fear: Republicans would certainly oppose those ideas, too. They always do.

 

Bag O' Books: Eating Animals

How to respond to Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Eating Animals? Let us examine the choices:

* BOREDOM: This might be your initial response. After all, the last decade has seen the rise of a new -- or maybe renewed -- literary subgenre concerned with the ethics and sustainability of how we eat. Eric Schlosser got the ball rolling with 2001's Fast Food Nation; the intervening decade has brought us Matthew Scully's Dominion and David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, among other contributions. Mark Bittman once advised us How To Cook Everything, but more recently has decided that Food Matters -- and that maybe we shouldn't be eating so much meat.

The masterpiece of this movement, of course, is Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which took its readers on a tour of 21st century "factory farming," with steps along the way for moral contemplation of meat eating, hunting and Whole Foods shopping. Pollan's tome -- and a couple of spinoff books -- was a smash hit, finding its way to the bottom of thousands of reusable cloth bags toted by enviro-foodies to farmers markets across the land.

So what's new for Foer to say? Not much, honestly. His reportage here covers much of the same ground already trod by Pollan. Factory farming -- we're told again -- is a dirty, cruel process that is awful to behold is probably making us sick. If you've read Pollan, you're likely to find yourself in the grip of a second possible reaction:

* IRRITATION: What Foer does offer is attitude and sanctimony. Where Pollan is professorial, using narrative to nudge his reader toward a conclusion, Foer comes across a smart, profane, angry undergrad -- one you might try to avoid on the quad when he starts hectoring passerby to stop and watch his Meet Your Meat video. He might be in command of the facts, but damn he's annoying.

It wouldn't be fair to compare Foer to Pollan so much, except that Pollan is one of the targets here. In Omnivore, Pollan concludes he's not willing to give up meat -- but he decides to seek it from alternative sources (local ranchers, hunters) who use sustainable practices and keep animal cruelty at a minimum. This draws Foer's moral ire, declaring that Pollan is among those who "never, absolutely never, emphasize that virtually all of the time one's choice is between cruelty and ecological destruction, and ceasing to eat animals."

There's only one problem with this critique: Foer ends the book as a committed vegetarian -- as he has to, really, once he decides he cannot justify any amount of animal suffering in the name of a good meal. Despite this decision, however, he vows that he can support efforts to create sustainable, minimally cruel family farms.

"The meat industry has tried to paint people who take this two-fold stance as absolutist vegetarians hiding a radicalized agenda," Foer writes. "But ranchers can be vegetarians, vegans can build slaughterhouses, and I can be a vegetarian who supports the best of animal agriculture."

We never really understand why Foer -- who finds any level of animal suffering to be unacceptable -- decides this approach is appropriate. But bizarrely, this conclusion is not that far from Pollan's own. The distinction, I suppose, is that Foer is really sensitive and tortured about the process. This is moral preening, and that is all it is.

This sanctimony -- replete with references to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Holocaust -- would make Eating Animals worth tossing in the trash bin at your nearest barbecue joint ... were it not for the third possible reaction to this book:

* GRUDGING ACCEPTANCE THAT FOER IS KINDA MAYBE RIGHT: Damnit, factory farming is gross. It fills our rivers and waterways with shit; it fills our air with climate-changing gases; it delivers meat filled with contaminants and antibiotics. And it is, by any rational standard, cruel: chickens have their beaks cut off; pigs live in their own waste; cattle are dismembered while alive and conscious. These are facts that should give one pause -- if not for the sake of the animals, then for the sake of our own health.

Foer, of course, wants more than a pause. He wants a halt. The environmental factors are important to his case, but it's clear he considers the moral argument most persuasive.

"Think about it," he asks. "Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?"

My first, glib answer: A little bit of both.

Less glibly, what I mean to say is that I do not grant (say) chickens the same moral weight that I do a human being. Foer presents science here that chickens -- among other animals -- share human capacities for pain, fear, reason and other cognitive processes. I don't doubt that he's right. But still: I do not grant a chicken the same moral weight as a human. I just know there's a difference between us and them. (If chickens one day rule the earth, I may regret these words.)

Until then, though, I find the example of nature too compelling. Animals eat other animals. All the time.

Foer doesn't buy this argument. "The entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what's 'natural,'" he says. And he's right. But what is interesting to me about this is that environmentalists -- and, let's face it, there's a signficant overlap between them and the vegetarian community -- make this argument in no other context. Dams are unpardonable usurpations of Mother Nature's work; so are power plants. Environmentalists usually call on us to disturb nature as little as possible, to acclimate our processes to the earth's natural rhythms. Then dinner time comes.

So where does this leave us? Probably -- if you've ever given thought to your meals -- at the same place you started.

My family already buys our meat from a halal butcher who, in turn, buys his cattle and chickens directly from nearby Amish farmers. We already have escaped the factory farm system, putting our money toward something as sustainable and minimally cruel as we can achieve while still eating meat.

But we probably don't need to eat meat as often as we do. Tonight I prepared a vegetarian stew from the Sundays At Moosewood cookbook. It was delicious, stuffed full of veggies and spices, and any concerns I had about missing meat were quickly overcome by the fact that it was super tasty.

This, of course, is what Foer misses. In his quest for moral perfection, he forgets that a good meal -- even a simple meal, even a vegetarian meal -- can bring you pleasure. Pollan never forgets that. I know whose manifesto I find more appealing.

The anniversary

Ten years ago today I went to the emergency room at Thomas Jefferson Hospital, knowing that I was sick but unaware how close my body was to failing entirely. The doctors saved my life. But my body was left broken. I am grateful that I didn’t leave my son fatherless when he was still a toddler. I struggle every day with how to make a good life in a broken body. I am better at that task right now than I have been, but it is still an effort, and the trauma of that year never really goes away. That’s life, I guess. Is there a German word that captures a recognition that one is fortunate but also haunted by a sense of loss? That's me.

Hopefully, I’ll be here in 10 years to give you another update. But nothing is guaranteed. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.

Conservatives Against Philanthropy: Are Bill Gates and Warren Buffett Socialists?

They're wearing red. That can't be a coincidence.

I confess I don't get this reaction to the June story in Fortune about how Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are trying to persuade other billionaires to leave half their estates to charity:

As it turns out, however, the writer, senior editor-at-large Carol Loomis, struck a raw nerve with Fortune readers. Most were outraged – regarding the philanthropy plan as grandstanding that would do nothing to create jobs or to address horrific problems, including runaway government spending, the spiraling deficit, and the near-comatose state of the economy. As Fortune notes in its July 26 issue, “When Carol Loomis reported on Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates’ plan to pledge half of their wealth away, the comments – nearly 500 of them – came in fast and, literally, furious.”

According to Fortune’s own tally, the comments ran 2-to-1 against Buffett and Gates. The included 36 percent of who readers described the philanthropy plan as “a publicity stunt/dangerous/the work of socialists” and another 26 percent who said the money that Buffett, Gates, and the other billiionaires were proposing to spend on charity should be spent in other ways – to pay off the U.S. debt, to help individuals, or reinvested in the creation of new businesses and job opportunities.

Any number of readers wrote in to urge Buffett and Gates to remember that they were supposed to be capitalists. As one put it, “For all their vast wealth, these people don’t have a clue about how economies flourish and fail. Don’t GIVE your money away. That’s called putting it in a bottomless pit. INVEST IT. Create some badly needed jobs by creating something called BUSINESSES with that capital.”

This is why I'm confused: Conservatives have typically sought to defuse allegations that they're heartless moneygrubbers by saying that they're not against helping poor or needy people, exactly -- they just think it's the job of communities and churches and private charity, not the state. But if they're now so critical of private individuals actually giving their money to charity, what's left?

Is the Ayn Randization of the business community becoming complete? Is the only virtue to build yourself and your profit? Is altruism morally suspect in this universe?

A conservative friend suggests that some of the response is less "anti-charity" than a reaction against the kinds of charity Gates and Buffett are supporting. (Buffet has, quietly, used his philathropical reach to try to expand access to abortion.) And their efforts do seem aimed at more than feeding the hungry and healing the sick -- they want to use their billions to transform societies. From the Fortune article, a description of a dinner where several billionaires told their stories of philathropy:

The charitable causes discussed in those stories covered the spectrum: education, again and again; culture; hospitals and health; the environment; public policy; the poor generally. Bill Gates, who found the whole event "amazing," regarded the range of causes as admirable: "The diversity of American giving," he says, "is part of its beauty."

But it's not as though Gates or Buffett have the power to compel other rich people to give to charity -- much less determine which philanthropies those rich people choose to fund. So statism -- usually the bugaboo of capitalist-conservatives -- seems to be absent from the equation. How the effort equates to "socialism," I'm at a loss to understand.

As it happens, today's New York Times has a front-page story about India -- that economic up-and-comer whose growth sometimes seems to come at the expense of America's -- and the debate there over whether the poor have a right to eat. Even with the availability of more good-paying jobs than ever before, there are still many, many Indians in poverty: 421 million. Which happens to be more people than exist in the United States, rich or poor.

The point here is not to disparage capitalism. It may have some warts, but it has also created more wealth -- and lifted more people out of poverty -- than any other force in history. So Gates and Buffett's critics are right to an extent: Start some businesses and put some people to work! You know what? That can easily be done with the billions of dollars each man will still have, even after their sizable philanthropic donations. It's not an either-or question.

The critics seem more than a little  foolish when they suggest that two self-made billionaires don't understand economics. They're also guilty of narrow thinking. As India shows -- and American history demonstrates -- there are places the market cannot reach and people the market cannot help, even in the most vibrant of economies. (There are places it probably shouldn't reach, but that's another discussion.) Conservatives usually seem to know this, which is why they've advocated private charity as a solution to such ills. To see them now sneer at altruism is weird and a little unsettling.