Do you have paid sick days? Have you been fired or lost pay because you didn’t? Tell us about it.
Sarah got that stomach dropping call last week from her son’s daycare center: Her son, Jack, was sick, and needed to be picked up right away. For the rest of the day, Sarah and her husband took turns, juggling between meetings and appointments so Jack could be home, get to the doctor, and get better.
Many of us have been through this. It’s part of raising kids. Tell us about your experience.The best and most powerful advocacy tool we have is your personal experiences–real stories about how laws impact folks every day. Your experience and personal story may be the very thing that changes someone’s mind about Paid Sick days, and helps us win this important legislation.
2 Comments
@M W- What an amazing story! Thanks for sharing this.
Reminds me of a great resource to share: http://www.workingwithkids.org/, which also has a link to the useful and interesting Babies in the Workplace site.
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May 20, 2010 at 9:20 am by M WI work for a small marketing business and because of our size my employer is not required by law to provide any sort of maternity leave. Because I had successfully web-commuted for 2.5 months in 2009 from out of state, my boss and I informally agreed that I would web-commute from home after the baby was born. “As long as the work gets done,” he said he’d “do his best to take care” of me. I worked full time at the office up until the day I went into labor, had my baby at home, and was logged in working an hour here and an hour there (with baby AND computer on my lap) starting on day 5. This was too soon and I was so overwhelmed I cried, but still, I got the work done. 13 days later my boss informed me he could no longer afford to pay me full time and he shared his plans for drastically down sizing his company. I agreed to be paid half-salary, and then hourly as a temporary stop-gap for him while he re-ordered his businesses. He let go his other 2 full time employees. I continued to get the work done at home. At 5 months I began bringing my baby to the office with me 3 days per week. That was 2 months ago. It’s going well. I’m still at half-salary but things are picking up business-wise, so it is tough to get all the work done in 20 hours. In this case I think both my employer and I have been flexible. It feels right that we are both making space for one another to transition our lives and businesses. I am a happy, productive, loyal worker and an attached, responsive parent.
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