Star-Ledger - September 5, 2013 - When a stomach bug flattens your family, should it cost a day’s pay? Does flu season put you in fear of losing your job? For more than 1.2 million New Jersey workers without paid sick days, catching a cold means choosing between their health and their job.

Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop is calling for nearly all city businesses to guarantee time off for illness. His proposal, requiring companies with 10 or more workers to offer five paid sick days a year, goes to the city council next week, he told the New York Times. He says it’s a matter of “basic dignity for working families.”

Fulop puts himself smartly in front of this nationwide trend. Letting sick workers stay home is good for their health — not to mention their co-workers’, or the customers’. Do you want a sniffling, sneezing waiter serving lunch because he’ll be fired if he stays home?

In 1992, half the nation’s workers got paid sick time. Twenty years later, it’s 61 percent, even as wages and paid vacation are shrinking. Connecticut adopted paid sick leave in 2011. Massachusetts is debating it. New York City made it law in June. If Jersey City adopts Fulop’s plan — and it should — it would build momentum to expand the benefit statewide.

In May, Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt (D-Camden) introduceda bill requiring employers to offer at least 40 paid sick hours a year. It hasn’t moved.

Predictably, businesses bristled, citing cost. But the opposition doesn’t add up: On average, paid sick time accounts for less than 1 percent of private-sector payrolls, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And Fulop is sensitive to those worries: Small Jersey City employers would have to provide only unpaid sick time.

Paid sick leave is more than a public health concern. It’s economic justice. Increasingly, full-time jobs are difficult to find, and workers shouldn’t have to choose between their health and their paycheck. That was the rationale, too, when New Jersey enacted paid family leave in 2008.

Sick time should be a universal right.

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