Did You Know?
Workers with earned sick days were 28 percent less likely to experience occupational injuries than those without access to sick days.
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19 percent of non-voluntary part-time workers ages 18 to 64 are the primary wage earner in their family.
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68 percent of part time workers say their reasons for working part time are “non-economic.” The most common reasons are school, family obligations, and retired or social security limit on earnings.
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49 percent of food preparation and serving related jobs are part time, as are 34 percent of retail sales jobs, and 43 percent of personal care and service jobs. These jobs also tend to be low-wage jobs.
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The United States is the only developed country with no mandated paid annual leave for employees.
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Minimum wage in the United States is only 37 percent of the median wage. By contrast, the average among OECD countries is 48 percent.
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American workers are high performing, but their wages no longer reflect it. Between 1979 and 2009, U.S. productivity increased 80 percent, while hourly wages for median workers increased only 10.1 percent.
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Even though Americans spend 2.5 times more per capita on healthcare then the average Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development country, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not offer universal primary healthcare.
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Paid leave benefits for new fathers range from 2 days to 6 weeks among other high-income countries. In the United States, there is no national requirement for paid leave for new fathers.
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The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave, and it applies only to workplaces of over 50 employees. While this law was a step in the right direction, the United States is still the only high-income country with no universal paid parental leave law.
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When the minimum wage increases, consumer spending increases with it. Paying America’s low-wage workers better would help boost the nation’s economy.
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Contingent, or non-permanent, workers earn less money than permanent employees. More than 30 percent of the workforce in the United States is now contingent, which includes freelancers, part-time workers, independent contractors, agency temps, and others.
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On average, Americans work 4.8 more weeks per year than workers in other developed nations. In 2007, Americans worked an average of 45.9 weeks of the year. By contrast, the average German worked 41 weeks, and the average Norwegian 36 weeks.
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Almost half of all part-time workers were primary wage earners in 2009, up from 31 percent in 1969.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that it would cost an employer just 8 cents per hour worked to offer paid sick days to workers in the service industry.
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Rigid managers increase workers’ cardiovascular risk. An NIH study has found that the most rigid managers, those who do not respond to the needs of their workers, double the cardiovascular risks of employees.
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In 2009, involuntary part-time work has reached a 30-year high, and the length of the average workweek has fallen to a record low 33.3 hours.
Source: Julia R. Henly and Susan J. Lambert, Scheduling in Hourly Jobs: Promising Practices for the Twenty-First Century Economy, May 2009
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Paid sick days minimize the spread of the flu, a highly contagious ailment that accounts for 10 to 12 percent of all illness-related work absences.
Source: Vicky Lovell, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Paid Sick Days Improve Public Health by Reducing the Spread of Disease, Washington, DC 2006
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Only one in four low-wage workers has paid sick days.
Source: Vicky Lovell, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Paid Sick Days Improve Public Health by Reducing the Spread of Disease, Washington, DC 2006
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Barely half of all workers has paid sick days to care for themselves, and only one in three have sick days to care for sick children.
Vicky Lovell, No Time to Be Sick: Why Everyone Suffers When Workers Don’t Have Paid Sick Leave, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Washington, DC 2004
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