"Take a sick day," people say, as if it's easy as that.  With the recent swine flu hysteria, everyone is pointing fingers at the Typhoid Marys of the world who struggle out into public even when they are coughing, sneezing, running fevers.  They drag their germ-producing carcasses into work, to the grocery store, to the gas station.  They sneeze and then touch the door handle, the elevator button, the hand rail.  And everyone suffers.

The problem is that this willful, selfish Typhoid Mary is a straw man, a fictional construct.  I've been guilty of this, myself.  I vividly remember informing a coworker that she should take a sick day and go home before she got us all sick.  She sniffled and gave me an exasperated look.  "I don't HAVE any sick days," she said.

I, young and childless, was stunned by this.  It was only March!  How could she have used up her 10 company-allotted sick days already?  Well, she was a single parent, with three young children.  It's different for kids: if a child shows up for daycare visibly sick, the daycare will send them straight back home.  And guess who has to take a sick day for that?

In theory she could have taken an unpaid personal day.  But A) she couldn't afford to skip a day's pay, not with three kids and a mortgage.  And B) everyone knew that if you took more than one unpaid personal day a year, it would seriously impact your performance review.  People who took too many unpaid personal days were malingerers, they didn't have that commitment to the company, they left the office at the drop of a hat.  They weren't promoted, and when layoffs rolled around (as they always did), these were the first people to get cut.

What the "Take a sick day" brigade overlooks is that no one wants to come into work sick.  Being sick involves a bone-deep urge to stay home and rest; how can it not?  Being sick and having to get yourself showered and dressed and out into that morning commute is one of the worst experiences of workday life. 

No one would go through that just because it hadn't occurred to them to phone in sick.  No one would do it just to prove a point.  People do it because they HAVE to.  They may (like my former coworker) have used up all their sick days already, or they may be working a job where you simply don't get sick days.  Jobs without sick days are surprisingly common.  And if you don't have sick leave, and you can't afford to miss a day's income, what are you supposed to do?  Haul your sweaty carcass out of bed, that's what.

Watching my coworker sneeze her way through her day was one of the first times the inhumanity of the American job system was brought home to me.  The long drive for maximizing profits over everything else (like treating your employees humanely) has been going strong for a long time.  I wonder if now is when we will finally, sadly, reap the end result of this unrestrained capitalism, as viruses like swine flu spread like wildfire through the workplace.

Wash your hands, people.  Wash your hands.