Page 7 - Sonoma County Gazette April 2020
P. 7

SICK LEAVE cont’d from page 6
comparable to New York, providing emergency 14 day paid sick days for Californians affected by the coronavirus––but our state and local elected officials should go much further and make paid sick leave permanent.
The virus may be contained in the next several months, but experts warn
it could continue to circulate, causing new outbreaks over a year or more. Paid sick leave also is needed to address other infectious diseases such as influenza, afflicting 35 million and responsible for 34,500 deaths in 2018-2019 and norovirus–a significant cause of food poisoning affecting 20 million Americans each year.
Universal Guranteed
All workers need paid sick leave that employees accrued annually (usually one hour earned for every 30 hours worked for both full-time and part-time workers) is good for business, workers, consumers, and public health. The National Partnership
  protection during a mandated quarantine order.
Governor Newsom and the legislature should now enact legislation
    Paid Sick Leave for All
      for Women and Families has summarized peer-reviewed and academic studies about state and local paid sick leave policy:
• Workers who lack paid sick
leave are 1.5 times more
likely to spread a contagious
illness like flu or viral
infections, and more likely
to expose co-workers to the flu or colds than those with paid sick;
EPA Water Fluoridation Trial POPSTPONED Due to Coronavirus
      • 60 percent of food service workers reported working while sick and nearly half did so because they lacked paid sick days;
• Sick food service workers are involved with nearly half of all restaurant- related and foodborne illness outbreaks;
Submitted by Carol Goodwin Blick, CleanWaterSonomaMarin.org Fluoride Action Network (FAN) reports that the TSCA trial, challenging
• Workers with paid sick days recover more quickly from illnesses than those without, and employees lacking paid sick leave are more likely to prolong illnesses by working when sick;
the EPA on the safety of water fluoridation, has been postponed due to
the coronavirus pandemic. The lawsuit against the US EPA was brought under provisions in the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), Section 21. Plaintiffs argue that the neurotoxic harm from fluoridated water presents an unreasonable risk to children that far outweighs any benefit to teeth.
• Local jurisdictions with paid sick leave experience lower influenza rates than those without;
• Employees without paid sick leave are twice as likely to send their ill child to school, compared to working parents with paid sick days;
Paul Connett, PhD, director of FAN, says of the scientific evidence, “As
of 2020 there have been 72 fluoride-IQ studies, of which 64 found a lower
IQ among children with higher fluoride exposure. The level of evidence that fluoride is neurotoxic now far exceeds the evidence of the neurotoxicity of lead that was in place when lead was banned from gasoline.
1. The first* (2017), a groundbreaking study from Mexico City, finding a strong association between the amount of fluoride women were exposed to during pregnancy and IQ in their offspring. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp655 2. The second* (2019 in JAMA Pediatrics) essentially replicated the Mexico City finding, but in Canadian communities. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/ jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2748634
3. The third, (2019) found a 284% increase in the prevalence of ADHD among
children in fluoridated communities in Canada, compared to non-fluoridated Canadian communities. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0160412019315971
4. The fourth study (2020) found that bottle-fed children in fluoridated communities in Canada had IQs as much as 9 points lower, compared with bottle-fed children in non-fluoridated Canadian communities. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S0160412019326145
• Job turnover is lower for workers with paid sick leave, saving employers the cost of employee hiring and training and yielding increased worker productivity and a higher quality of services;
• Connecticut was the first state to enact universal paid sick leave in 2011 and the cost to employers was less than 0.4 percent of annual sales revenue. San Francisco enacted paid sick leave in 2006, and three years later, more than two-thirds of employers expressed support for the policy.
Santa Rosa, the County of Sonoma, and other local jurisdictions should consider a permanent paid sick leave policy like the City of Oakland – but add for large employers, 14 additional paid sick days during a public health crisis if the state does not.
The coronavirus crisis has revealed the lowering of labor standards, the shredding of social-safety-net protections, and the downsizing of the public health infrastructure since the 1970s. Paid sick leave is an essential part of a progressive agenda to address the coronavirus crisis and restore economic and social security for American workers.
Martin J. Bennett is Instructor Emeritus of History at Santa Rosa Junior College. Contact him at mbennett@vom.com
[NOTE: *Funded by the US National Institutes of Health]
More: “Fluoride & IQ: The 64 Studies. http://fluoridealert.org/studies/brain01/
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