A Health Impact Assessment of the California Healthy Families, Healthy Workplaces Act of 2008 is our site of the day

Human Impact Partners and researchers at the San Francisco Department of Health have released a report, “A Health Impact Assessment of the California Healthy Families, Healthy Workplaces Act of 2008,” based on a health impact assessment made earlier this year. This 79 page report documents the relationship of paid sick days to individual and community level health.

Almost 40 percent of California’s workforces, 5.4 million workers, do not have the right to take paid time off from work when they are sick.

AB 2716 by Assemblymember Fiona Ma is pending before the California legislature – the Healthy Families, Healthy Workplaces Act – that would guarantee a minimum number of paid sick days for all workers in the state. The California Assembly has already approved the legislation, which is now pending before the Senate. In the next few weeks before the legislature adjourns for the year, this legislation will either make it to the governor’s desk or die.

The information in this report are directly relevant to the policy considerations on AB 2716—and together with a Field Poll on this topic released today—are most timely. It would behoove all who are interested in this legislation to read closely this report and its findings. Among them:

• Sufficient evidence exists to support the conclusion that the law would have significant positive public health impacts.

• The guaranteed availability of paid sick days would increase workers’ use of sick time to care for medical conditions and to care for sick dependents.

• A guarantee of paid sick days would reduce the hazard of communicable disease transmission in community settings including restaurants and long-term care facilities, with potential for reductions in infectious disease outbreaks.

• Paid sick days would have a particularly significant benefit in enabling established community mitigation strategies for pandemic flu.

• A guarantee of paid sick days would prevent potential hunger and loss of housing among low-income workers by mitigating wage loss during periods of illness.

Read the report for the full documentation, research, and literature review on all of these--and more.