Restaurant workers showing up to their jobs while sick were linked to 40 percent of food poisoning outbreaks between 2017 to 2019, highlighting the need for paid leave and other worker protections.
According to a CDC report released Tuesday, which examined 800 food poisoning cases from state and local health departments, “comprehensive ill worker policies will likely be necessary" to prevent future outbreaks and improve food safety.
"Although a majority of managers reported their establishment had an ill worker policy, often these policies were missing components intended to reduce foodborne illness risk," it reads. 'Contamination of food by ill or infectious food workers is an important cause of outbreaks; therefore, the content and enforcement of existing policies might need to be re-examined and refined."
Of the 725 managers interviewed by health departments, 665 said workers are required to tell a supervisor if they are sick, with 620 saying sick employees are prohibited from working. However, less than half of the managers — 316 — said that their business or company offered paid sick leave to workers. The United States is the only wealthy nation without federal paid sick leave.
Workers will often show up to shifts while sick simply because they can't afford to lose the money they would earn working. In many cases, they also cannot find anyone to cover their shift, and will go in to avoid penalty or to avoid leaving their coworkers understaffed. The report said that restaurants should work to develop “a food safety culture where absenteeism due to illness is not penalized.”
Daniel Schneider, a professor of social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The New York Times that the report is "sobering."
“Reports like this show the real urgency of it, not just because it’s in workers’ interests, although it is, but because it is in the public interest," he said. “Food service workers face really impossible trade-offs around issues like working sick because food service jobs are so low-paid in our economy."
