This is as gross to me as the thought of an expired hamburger that has fallen on the floor and been sneezed on prior to sale. The restaurant lobby spent $837,000 to defeat a sick days bill in Denver, according to the trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News.

The bill, Initiative 300, would have given part-time and full-time employees at businesses with 10 or more workers 72 hours of paid sick leave. Businesses with less employees would have been required to give a maximum of 40 hours paid sick leave.

In other words, the restaurants prefer that employees serve food sick rather than give their workers even an hour of paid leave. Please, pass me the hand sanitizer!

Known as Initiative 300, the paid sick leave mandate was on a ballot initiative on which 104,217 people voted. Of those, 36 percent, or 37,498 voters said yes, while 64 percent, or 66,719, rejected the measure….

“The people of Denver lost today — people like home health care nurse Patricia Hughes, who was fired after calling in sick with pneumonia; Mandie Freyta, a Latina mother who lost a week’s wages because she stayed home with her four children when they had the flu; and people like barista Laura Baker and bartender Eric Love, who have gone to work sick because they need to work every hour they can just to make the rent,” said Erin Bennett, spokesperson for the Campaign for Healthy Denver.

“The people of Denver were unable to overcome the money and power of big business interests, from the National Restaurant Association and other lobbyist groups who are part of a larger national corporate agenda designed to stop paid sick days,” Bennett said.

A whopping 86% of food and public accommodation workers have no paid sick days, according to numbers crunched by MomsRising.org. Nearly half of workers in the public sector (48%) have no access to paid sick days. Yuck. It’s stories like these that make me think we need to bring back the unions.