I developed a severe case which turned into bacterial pneumonia; although otherwise fit and healthy, I have asthma, which makes me especially susceptible to respiratory illnesses. I spent Valentine’s Day flat on my back, wheezing and struggling to breathe while the antibiotics worked their magic.

Say what you will about azithromycin; it sure does kill bacteria good.

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I work as a server, and I almost certainly contracted the flu from my workplace; prior to becoming sick, I served multiple customers who told me they were ill, which means exposure to their breath, used plates, napkins and cutlery, and surfaces they have touched. Moreover, several of my coworkers were ill with the same symptoms on the last shift I worked before becoming sick.

If you are worried about infection from COVID-19, you should be less concerned about hoarding masks and hand sanitizer (which you really shouldn’t be doing) and more concerned about the ways that poverty, a lack of access to health care, and general class inequality in North America could contribute to spreading it.

In Canada, where I live, servers are usually paid at or slightly below provincial minimum wage, and in the USA it’s often less than the already abysmal minimum wage. Most food service workers — servers, like myself, as well as cooks, bussers, and a vast variety of other folks working for an hourly wage — do not get paid sick days, which means taking time off even when you are pretty much dying costs you money.

Money you probably don’t have, which means you come into work sick.

For me, this was the first time in my 15-year career in the service industry that I have ever called in sick for multiple, back to back shifts. Tips are variable, but I estimate my three days off cost me about $350, plus $100 worth of medication. That doesn’t include the cost of my emergency room visit, which an uninsured American would also have to pay for.

I’m really lucky that I work with good people and have a kind boss, who helped me cover my shifts; in many restaurants, the culture is not so forgiving, and calling in sick with anything less than a brain aneurysm is a sign of weakness. You’ve “screwed everyone over” by not coming in and making someone else work a double or else work shorthanded. In many other restaurants  I’ve worked in, you may find yourself missing shifts you would usually work on the next schedule — a “punishment” for the selfish act of allowing a virus to infiltrate your body and replicate within your cells, you lazy prick.

The main reason I was able to take a couple sick days this time around — regardless of the fact that I had to, since I couldn’t actually get out of bed — was that I have another job where I’m self-employed. In short, I had some extra money and could afford to not go to work and sweat and sneeze and cough all over people, food, and objects.

Not only does this mean I didn’t infect other people — COVID-19, incidentally, is primarily spread through respiratory droplets in the air, and by person to person contact — but I recovered faster because I got the medical care and rest I needed, which means I returned to work more quickly. Better for me, better for my boss, better for the health of everyone.

By contrast, as I recently tweeted about, this isn’t the first time I’ve had pneumonia; in 2013, I had walking pneumonia for two weeks, during which I worked the majority of the time handling food in close proximity to customers. I didn’t do that because I’m a selfish jerk unaware or unconcerned about the health of others, I did so because I wouldn’t make my rent if I took time off and because I was working in a place where I was afraid of what would happen if I called in.

Not only was I sick much longer in that case — and therefore capable of infecting others for a longer period of time — it took me months to fully recover, which had further economic impacts for me. I would have been a better worker, infected fewer people, and been less of a strain on the health system had someone just given me a goddamn paid sick day; it would have been cheaper and better for literally everyone in my community.

In 2017, 130 people were sickened by an outbreak of norovirus — a highly contagious gastrointestinal illness — which was directly linked to Chipotle’s management policies around sick workers. It’s not just about the policy, though; even if workers had been “allowed” to call in sick and supported by management to do so, they’re going to come into work if missing that shift means no gas in their car, or their kid doesn’t get lunch tomorrow, or it’s ramen for dinner every single day for the next week.

When you economically punish people for getting sick, more people are going to get sick.

All signs point to COVID-19 being a genuine pandemic that we should all be concerned about and thinking about — which means we need to care not only for ourselves, but for others. If you care about your health, care about how the people around you live and are treated in their everyday lives.

Viruses don’t care how much money their host makes, but how much money their host makes, and how we treat working-class people when they get sick, may impact how many opportunities COVID-19 has to spread.

But her work is grueling and at times dangerous. Sometimes she isn’t paid for the work she does. Even when she is paid what she’s owed, it isn’t much and comes without any benefits.

She doesn’t get any paid time off; once when she had to stay home to care for her sick son, one of her employers got extremely angry with her. “I have to work when their kids are sick and they give me their viruses, but I can’t stay home when they give them to mine,” she noted.

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She’s experienced discrimination for speaking Spanish and being Latina, she said, including a client who told her they weren’t happy her son went to the same high school as their son. Years ago, she was even the victim of sexual abuse. Bosses have undressed in front of her and insinuated that they wanted to have sex with her. “I actually had to stop working, which was a financial hardship,” she said. “That kind of abuse impacts all parts of your life, including with your family … We bring the heaviness of these abuses home.”

But there wasn’t much that she could do about it. Domestic workers were the only type of worker excluded from Philadelphia’s antidiscrimination protections. “No habia una ley,” she said; there was no law protecting her or offering her recourse.

That will soon change. Since the middle of 2018, when the Pennsylvania Domestic Workers Alliance was formed, del Carmen and other domestic workers in her city have had one goal: Establishing a domestic workers bill of rights to include them in basic labor protections and even grant them powerful new ones. On October 31, that goal was achieved when the Philadelphia city council unanimously passed a bill establishing rights for the city’s 16,000 housekeepers and caregivers. It’s the 10^th such law in the country, joining those in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, Oregon, and Seattle.

Philadelphia’s bill of rights does three key things. First, it makes sure domestic workers are included in basic labor standards such as protection from racial, gender, age, national origin, and language discrimination, as well as the right to meal and rest breaks. It also goes above that floor to require that domestic workers be given legally binding written contracts in both English and their preferred language outlining job responsibilities, hours, and payment schedules. Employers also have to give domestic workers at least two weeks’ notice of termination, protect their privacy, and provide a notice of their rights.

But the third facet is the most radical: The city will create the country’s first-ever portable paid time off benefit system. The bill establishes a right to get paid time off for all workers, no matter how many employers they have. With that in place, it mirrors the city’s existing paid sick leave ordinance, which grants workers an hour of paid time off for every 40 they work.

Now, when a domestic worker puts in 40 hours across all of her jobs, she’ll be due an hour of paid time off, funded by prorated payments from each of her employers into a central benefit bank. Employers will have to contribute paid time off for any domestic workers they hire for five or more hours a month. The benefit bank will still be hers to claim even if she changes clients later on.The bank will be coordinated not by domestic workers themselves or even their employers, but through technology developed by a third-party vendor. The employers “don’t need to be talking to each other, and the worker doesn’t need to be coordinating between them either,” explained Nicole Kligerman, director of the Pennsylvania Domestic Workers Alliance.

“The 20^th century social safety net system is based on one person and one employer,” Kligerman noted. But many people now work in arrangements that don’t fit into that mold – working in the so-called “gig economy” or classified (and misclassified) as independent contractors –  which means they’re denied standard workplace benefits. Domestic workers hope their portable paid time off system can offer a new alternative.

Domestic workers are “the original gig economy workers,” Kligerman said, and they “can and always have led the way” on labor reform. But such a system could easily be imagined for other workers with more than one employer. “The implications are obviously really big,” she said. Ride share drivers, for example, are already looking into it. “We’re excited to be a guinea pig.”

Del Carmen was involved in lobbying for and crafting the bill of rights. “At times it was really difficult, some of [the council members] even ran away from us,” she said. But they kept showing up, week after week. “We fought as a team until we won.”

The feeling when the bill passed unanimously, including yes votes from the three Republicans on the city council? “Maravilloso,” she said. All of the provisions she and other domestic workers were fighting for made it into the final bill. “It really is complete,” she said. “And now other states can copy us.”

Had the bill of rights been in place 25 years ago, “my life would have been much easier,” del Carmen said. “I wouldn’t have shed so many tears for all of the things that happened to me.”

Del Carmen has already seen the impact of the newly passed bill of rights. All of her clients are working on creating a written contract. “I told them if I don’t sign a contract, I’m not going to work for them anymore,” she said.

She’s also very excited about finally getting some paid time off from work. “I’ve never had it,” she noted. “I’m just going to be at home enjoying my house. I’ve never been able to do that.”

The bill passed by the D.C. Council goes into effect in 2020, granting eligible workers eight weeks of paid leave per year for a new child, six weeks toward care for an ill relative, and two weeks to attend to a temporary disability. It is the product of a two-year battle between advocates, who originally proposed 16 weeks of paid leave funded through a payroll tax, and a business lobby that fought for half as much leave with unclear funding mechanisms.

But since the UPLA became law in April—without the signature of Mayor Muriel Bowser, who cited concerns about the tax it imposes and the fact that it creates a new bureaucracy—four Council members have come forward with proposals to overhaul how the program is administered. Although the bills that have gained the most traction don’t reduce the length of paid leave or the wage replacement rate, they introduce new systems that threaten to compromise workers’ ability to actually access their benefits.

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Under the current law, benefits will be funded by a 0.62 percent payroll tax paid by employers. The D.C. government will administer the program in its entirety, meaning that workers will submit paid leave requests to and receive benefits from a government agency instead of negotiating them with their employers. This model is a boon to workers, many of whom have seen requests for paid leave denied by managers.

But, at the behest of business and trade associations, multiple D.C. Council members have introduced alternatives to the UPLA that replace the centralized system in current law with one that gives control to individual employers––in many cases, the same employers who opposed the paid leave bill in the first place. Under the bulk of these proposals—there are five in total—employers pay significantly less in payroll taxes (in some cases a rate of just .1 percent), and instead either pay for paid leave benefits out of pocket or purchase private insurance.

This system—termed the employer mandate—replaces the predictable payroll tax with an unknown, and likely very volatile, cost to employers, who will have to pay for paid leave out of pocket, and can’t predict when employees will need to access their benefits. Because businesses’ profit margins are on the line, it creates a powerful incentive for employers to discriminate against the workers who are most likely to need to take time off from work. Currently, it isn’t uncommon for employers to pay these workers less, fire them, or just not hire them in the first place, rather than provide them paid leave. For low-wage earners, who are more often subject to intimidation by employers, the stakes are especially high.

In the United States, paid family leave is uniquely difficult to come by—unlike in literally every other industrialized country, where it’s guaranteed to workers. Only a handful of states (and now D.C.) have such laws on the books, and the majority of the nation’s employees are faced with untenable decisions between a paycheck and critical time off to care for themselves, a relative, or a newborn. On the flipside, when people have access to paid leave, their labor force participation rates improve, alongside their economic security and their health outcomes.

D.C. workers had been promised one of the nation’s strongest paid leave programs, and a full 82 percent of D.C. residents––who also, after all, live in one of the nation’s most progressive hubs––support it. But under these new proposals, some of the workers who need those benefits the most may never receive them.

I will never forget the testimony of a young mom from a Seattle suburb. During her pregnancy, she saved up every hour of her limited paid time off so that when her child was born, she would be able to spend every possible precious moment bonding with and caring for her newborn.

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But one Thursday, she went into labor prematurely. Her baby boy was placed in intensive care at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and she went back to work on Monday. Her paid time off was so limited that she needed to save it for when her baby could come home. So, every day after work, she drove the 25 miles to Seattle to be with her baby until the hospital visiting hours ended.

Families have to make devastating choices every day because most working people do not get paid family and medical leave at their jobs. In particular, most lower-wage jobs do not offer any paid vacation or sick leave, though it is typically available to highly paid workers.

That’s why I am thrilled that on July 5, Washington’s Gov. Jay Inslee (D) signed the country’s most progressive and comprehensive paid family and medical leave insurance program into law. We built it from scratch, with bipartisan support and significant input from leaders in business, advocacy, and labor.

The new law covers everyone working in our state and is fully portable between jobs. It also includes a progressive benefit structure so that instead of providing a flat percentage of a person’s wage—which would pay lower-wage workers less and higher-wage workers more—the paid time off is graduated based on income. For a minimum wage worker, our benefit provides a 90 percent wage replacement. For higher-wage workers, the benefit caps at $1,000 a week. This ensures that every working Washingtonian, regardless of income, can afford to take the time they need with a new baby, a dying parent, or to recover from a serious illness or accident.

Crafting this policy took us a decade. We passed an initial paid family leave program that was never funded because of the Great Recession, but our coalition of lawmakers, advocates, and unions never gave up the goal. When the state’s 2016 ballot initiative campaign to raise the minimum wage and mandate paid sick leave passed easily with broad support, that let us begin serious negotiations again. Early polling indicated that a paid family and medical leave initiative that included a 100 percent employer-funded program would have received even broader support. The business community got similar results when they decided to test public opinion, so they came to the table early in the year to open discussions.

Though Seattle has a national reputation for being a progressive bastion, Washington state as a whole is actually quite purple. A Republican-led majority controls the state Senate by only one seat, and Democrats control the state House by only two seats. A young, socially moderate Republican floor leader, Sen. Joe Fain, led the effort to bring his caucus to the table. Fain had a baby boy last year, and he learned firsthand the need to have the time to bond and grow as a family. In state legislatures, relationships across the aisle are still important to make progress on policy.

In an era that feels increasingly divided along partisan lines on so many issues, Americans are overwhelmingly united in support of paid family and medical leave. This is why I believe that Washington’s historic victory must become the model for state-by-state enactment of such laws. The legislation we crafted, with a diverse range of stakeholders and perspectives, provides a roadmap for all states considering paid family and medical leave, whether they are under single-party control or a divided government.

Ultimately, the paid family and medical leave bill received 37 of the possible 49 votes in the Senate and 65 of the possible 98 votes in the House. The conditions for passage in Washington state may have been unique, but the law we produced provides a framework for state-level leadership in a time in which federal Congressional gridlock seems incapable of progress.

But what is often left out of media coverage on HB2 is the fact that it does more than restrict bathroom access.  It also amends the state’s Wage and Hour Act to prevent any city, county, or other political jurisdiction within the state from passing or enforcing legislation or voter-mandated pro-worker policies, including minimum wage increases and paid family and medical leave laws. These restrictions have a tangible impact on people and families, including transgender and gender non-conforming communities, who are more likely than their peers to be job insecure and living in poverty.

In undermining the rights of workers, this law also undercuts what has become an important strategy through which antipoverty advocates are able to create change and influence state policy. Over the past year, cities, counties and states have moved to adopt higher minimum wages. Los Angeles, for example, passed legislation last year that raised its city-wide minimum wage to $15. And just this month, California passed a similar increase statewide, as did New York. Both states’ minimum wages are now far above the federal standard of $7.25 per hour.

Advocates in cities and counties have also had recent success in passing paid leave protections that are more expansive than what is provided by their states or the federal government. San Francisco recently adopted the most generous paid family leave law in the country, which requires all city employers with 20 or more workers to cover a full six weeks of paid family leave. Such laws have a significant impact on people and families with low-incomes, because low-wage workers are far less likely to have access to paid leave through work. Without these protections in place, workers may incur lost wages—or even be fired—if they take time off for unavoidable personal or medical emergencies.

Unfortunately, North Carolina isn’t the only state that is stripping cities and counties of their ability to pass proactive worker protections. In several other states, legislatures have either passed or introduced similar anti-worker bills—often in response to local minimum wage increases—with assistance and encouragement from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.  While Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe recently vetoed a similar bill that had made its way through the state’s legislature, anti-worker operatives continue to push damaging legislation.

The Department of Justice has rightly challenged the anti-transgender discrimination codified in HB2, but it is important to recognize that other portions of the bill deserve similar legal and political scrutiny for their dangerous impact on low-income people and communities of color.

In Alabama, the NAACP is challenging a similar law with a lawsuit against the state.  The suit claims that Alabama’s state law—which was passed earlier this year as a direct response to a city-wide minimum wage increase in Birmingham—is unconstitutional because it specifically targets Birmingham’s workers, who are overwhelmingly people of color. Last year, Birmingham became the first city in the Deep South to pass a minimum wage increase. According to the NAACP, the Alabama state legislature’s action builds upon a legacy of race-motivated preemption that was rampant during and after the days of Jim Crow.

In addition to issuing legal challenges, groups are also taking on these laws through direct action and legislative advocacy. For example, the North Carolina NAACP has joined forces with transgender rights advocates to engage in a series of protests, sit-ins, and legislative proposals that call for a full repeal of the anti-democratic HB2 law and highlight the entire range of its consequences.

“We cannot be silent in the face of this race-based, class-based, homophobic and transphobic attack on wage earners, civil rights, and the LGBTQ community,” said Reverend Dr. William Barber II, President of the North Carolina NAACP.  “Together with our many allies, we will coordinate a campaign of nonviolent direct action along with other forms of nonviolent protest that will instruct our legislators with respect to the rights of all people.”

Whether through legal advocacy or direct action, the federal government and advocates on the ground must continue to highlight and challenge the full range of damaging consequences wrought by HB2. This includes not only fighting back against North Carolina’s law, but taking on the many other pre-emptive bills across the country that will do harm to people with low-incomes and communities of color.

That’s right. In an apparent attempt to cement the United States’ status as the last industrialized nation on Earth without paid family leave, the Independent Women’s Forum proposed a system of Personal Care Accounts (PCAs) in which workers would save for their own paid leave based on the same 401(k) model that has left millions at risk of an insecure retirement.

The proposal would, of course, place the burden on individuals to save for their time off during the lowest-earning years of their lives. As Jeffrey Hayes from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research explains, the fact that women have kids early in their life means that there is very little time for parents’ savings to compound—limiting the main benefit of tax-free savings accounts as well as the savings of most people who aren’t already in the privileged position of being able to take time off.

And, there are other reasons why this proposal pales in comparison to existing plans to guarantee paid family leave.

“Personal Care Accounts” would leave out many young parents

The PCA is modeled after tax-exempt savings accounts such as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and 401(k)s. These savings vehicles are supposed to make it easier to accumulate wealth by allowing workers to defer paying taxes on contributions from themselves and their employer. Unfortunately, over two-thirds of 401(k) tax benefits go to the top 20 percent of households and most low-income households—the ones most unlikely to have paid leave—do not have access to a retirement account at work.  Notably, the IWF is also opposed to requiring employers to provide retirement benefits, indicating that their commitment to access is about as robust as our current paid leave laws.

The PCA would actually help even fewer people than does the 401(k) since younger workers have less money to save and are in a lower tax bracket, which means they benefit less from deferring taxes than older households. Indeed, the median income of a household headed by individuals between the ages of 25-34 is just $53,000 compared to $84,000 for 45-54 year olds. Given their lower incomes, it is no surprise that young adults have not been able to build very much wealth: the median young household actually has saved $0 for retirement. And so, at a time when half of all households say they could not come up with $400 for a financial emergency without selling assets or borrowing money, it is not credible to claim that young people should save for their paid leave—which they may similarly need unexpectedly—in yet another account.

Further limiting access, in order to use the PCA, a worker would have to have access to unpaid time off at work. However, the Family and Medical Leave Act—the current law that guarantees job-protected, unpaid time off—fails to cover about 40 percent of workers.

The likely use of PCAs? Increasing the limit on tax-free savings for the rich.

Low- and moderate-income households already pay little in federal taxes because of their low incomes: the bottom three quintiles of families with children pay an average of just $3,700 per year in individual and payroll taxes combined. So they don’t have much to gain from tax-free savings.

But, there is one group that does indeed stand to benefit from the use of PCAs: the rich. A saver in the top tax bracket would avoid paying about 40 cents in federal income taxes for every dollar they contribute—a huge subsidy from the government. PCAs would simply increase the number of accounts that well-off Americans can use to reduce their tax burden—after maxing out their 401(k), IRA, and health savings account, they would be able to stow away another $5,000 tax-free per year. The IWF did cap PCAs at $30,000—roughly two years of working full-time at the federal minimum wage—to limit the amount of sheltered income. But that means the plan will allow wealthy individuals to accumulate an additional $30,000 in tax-sheltered savings—or $60,000 per couple—resulting in less revenue for government services that would benefit the very low-income people left out in the cold under this policy proposal.

IWF itself doesn’t think PCAs will do the job

Strikingly, IWF itself implicitly admits that its proposal of tax-deferred saving would not be enough for working women by saying that wealthy individuals and corporations could fund PCAs out of charity. The report says:

“Additionally, non-profits could be established by generous individuals as well as larger corporations as part of their social corporate responsibility efforts to help set up and fund PCAs for lower income workers, in order to help provide leave benefits for those facing the biggest financial challenges. Many generous individuals and foundations are interested in helping people during times of childbirth or illness and would support such a cause.”

In other words, IWF is counting on a magical change in corporate and philanthropic behavior to pay for parental leave. Take retirement as an example. Although middle-class workers are facing a retirement crisis, there is no sign that corporations have decided to fill empty 401(k)s with their social responsibility funds. Surely, nothing will stop these same generous individuals and larger corporations from stepping up to fund paid leave for lower-income workers today.

To be sure, making it easier for Americans to save for the future is very important.  But when it comes to providing paid leave, there are much better solutions than hoping that individuals save enough during the lowest-earning years of their lives to cover their time off. Policies put forward by progressive members of Congress would substantially increase access to paid family and medical leave, instead of just giving yet another tax break to those who can already afford to save. It’s well past time to ensure that all Americans, no matter where they live—or how much they’re able to save—are able to take time off to care for their families.