Aaron Yelowitz joined KCBS interviewer Rebecca Corral to discuss a norovirus outbreak linked to a Chipotle employee who worked while sick, the incentives behind working while ill, and research on paid sick leave and employee absenteeism.
Participants
- Rebecca Corral: KCBS interviewer
- Aaron Yelowitz: Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the John H. Schnatter Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise, University of Kentucky
Related research
- Thomas Ahn and Aaron Yelowitz, “Paid Sick Leave and Absenteeism: The First Evidence from the U.S.,” working paper, 2016.
- Thomas Ahn and Aaron Yelowitz, “The Short-Run Impacts of Connecticut's Paid Sick Leave Legislation,” Applied Economics Letters 22(15), 2015, 1267–1272.
Transcript
00:00:00 — Rebecca Corral: According to the CEO of Chipotle, one employee coming to work sick has cost the company one billion dollars in market value. The employee was sick, which led to a norovirus outbreak at a store in Virginia. That scare, combined with Chipotle's past record, helped send the company's shares tumbling.
In response to the incident, Chipotle is now drilling into employees why they cannot work while sick, or at least while contagious. But breaking that mindset may be harder than they think. For more, we turn to the KCBS Newsline and talk with Dr. Aaron Yelowitz, Director of the John H. Schnatter Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky. Thanks very much for talking to us today.
This really could have happened at any restaurant or business. Why do we go to work when we're sick?
00:00:44 — Aaron Yelowitz: A couple of things. From what I understand about Chipotle—and first, thanks for having me on—it relies a lot more on fresh ingredients than some of the other restaurants, so it might be more likely at some sorts of chains than others.
But to get back to what you're talking about, there's probably some mindset out there about going into work, about fear of losing jobs, and so forth. There's work by Stefan Pichler and Nicolas Ziebarth, colleagues of mine in the economics profession, showing that about three million workers, or about two percent of all workers, go into work sick in any given week. So it is an issue. The solution is a little less clear.
00:01:26 — Rebecca Corral: There are, I guess, a couple of reasons. One: if you don't have sick pay and you really need the money, you go to work sick.
00:01:34 — Aaron Yelowitz: That's a great point. One of the interesting things about the Chipotle example is that the workers there do have paid sick leave. What actually went wrong is that they weren't using it when they had it. From my understanding from reading accounts, employees perhaps felt pressured not to use paid sick leave because of covering shifts and so forth.
But it does bring up this interesting question of whether paid sick leave actually would prevent these sorts of outbreaks from happening. There's some evidence, again by some of my economics colleagues in the profession, that sickness overall is lowered when there's paid sick leave. At the same time, some of my own work with one of my colleagues, Thomas Ahn, shows that absenteeism also goes up. People both call in sick for legitimate reasons, like this disaster at Chipotle, but also perhaps for reasons that are a little less legitimate as well.
00:02:34 — Rebecca Corral: We've all worked for places, also, that really pressure you to come to work no matter what.
00:02:39 — Aaron Yelowitz: Clearly, if they pay you, they're going to want you to be there at the job. In general, what's interesting is that in the U.S. we see far lower rates of absenteeism than in other countries. Whether that's due to pressure or whether that's due to a lack of paid sick leave is not so clear.
In the U.S., some of my work—again with my colleague Thomas Ahn—shows that on average about four days per year are taken for sick leave. In the sorts of surveys that we see, that's vastly different from, for example, other European countries where paid sick leave is more generous.
00:03:10 — Rebecca Corral: All right. So what can companies do to impress upon their employees that, when you're sick—especially if you have something contagious—you've got to stay home?
00:03:17 — Aaron Yelowitz: I wish I could tell you. That really does seem like the system failure here. The key point is that people went into work, and perhaps in this case it really was this story of manager pressure that happened at one chain. Perhaps that's systemwide; perhaps it's not.
Presumably, there are a lot of illnesses where we might not think they're terribly severe, but they're moderate. Sometimes those moderate illnesses are actually severe. In this case, presumably the worker knew it was a severe illness and felt pressure to go in regardless of that.
Clearly, one of the things that should happen, I would say, would be that if companies have a paid-sick-leave policy, if you're sick, you should be able to use it. That's something that we typically assume happens, though how you legislate that and how you enforce it seems like a real problem. From the accounts I've read about Chipotle, it seems like in general this may have been one rogue chain or something like that.
00:04:19 — Rebecca Corral: I think there are a lot of managers out there who do put the pressure on, so it's going to be a mindset that needs to be changed. Thanks a lot for talking to us. We do appreciate it. That was Dr. Aaron Yelowitz. He is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky. It's 11:36 at KCBS.