When companies fail to provide employees with adequate sick-leave policies and managers bully their workers into working while ill, the public health consequences are massive. Many sick employees spread the coronavirus to their coworkers and fellow commuters because they weren’t able to take time off from work in the early days of the pandemic.27 On a more mundane level, sick food-service employees often have no choice but to come in to work and spread their illness to fellow workers and patrons; 81 percent of food-industry workers have no employer-provided sick days.28
