Our guest blogger is Sarah Jane Glynn, an economic policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

When is a democracy not a democracy? Apparently the answer to that riddle is “when voters indicate they are interested in passing paid sick days laws.” In 2008, voters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin passed a referendum requiring earned sick leave for workers, but before it could go into effect Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) signed a bill which deprived individual cities of the ability to pass laws governing workers benefits, including paid sick leave.

Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) has preemptively signed a very similar law in the state of Louisiana, before advocates even had the chance to get a paid sick leave referendum on the ballot. And as November’s election draws closer, Florida is poised to do the same.

The campaign for earned sick leave in Orange County, Florida sparked serious opposition even before advocates submitted more than 50,000 signatures from registered voters to qualify the initiative for placement on the ballot. And now Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs and the County Commission are attempting to follow in the footsteps of Walker and Jindal by trying to place another initiative on the same ballot that would bar any workplace regulation covering employer-employee benefits.

If passed, the mayor’s initiative would render the paid sick days law moot, even if the sick days measure passed as well. Why all the fuss in the first place? The earned sick time initiative would allow workers in businesses with at least 15 employees to earn up to 56 hours of paid sick leave per year. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has found that such a policy would result in a net savings of $5.1 million for Orange County employers each year.

But the opposition continues to inflate the cost to businesses, by assuming every worker would take the maximum amount of leave (when workers take on average only 2-3 days per year), ignoring the fact that small employers are exempt, and pretending that seasonal workers would be covered (when an employee must work 90 days before they could start accruing leave).

The County Commission will be meeting tomorrow to decide whether the countermeasure will be on the ballot alongside the earned sick time initiative.

Our guest blogger is Melissa Boteach, Director of the Half in Ten project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Raising children is hard work. And no one is arguing that Ann Romney — who has been the center of attention since Democratic strategist Hillary Rosen contended that she “never worked a day in her life” — or any other stay-at-home mom doesn’t deserve our respect. But the question is not whether child-rearing is work. It’s whether the policies championed by the candidates afford the same respect and deference to the moms who have no choice but to balance the demands of being a breadwinner with the demands of motherhood.

Ann Romney has tweeted, “All moms are entitled to choose their path.” But unfortunately for low-wage working moms and nearly half of private sector workers, the” choice” is either “go to work and send my sick kid to school” or “stay at home with my sick child and risk losing my job or needed income.” That’s a choice no parent should have to make. Does Mitt Romney agree?

Women are now half of all workers on U.S. payrolls and breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of all families. Their incomes are sorely needed to provide basic economic security for their families.

Yet the U.S. also faces high rates of work-family conflict with few laws to support working families. One of the biggest culprits is workers’ lack of paid sick days to care for themselves, an elderly parent, or a sick kid – an issue that has been largely absent in the election debates.

Forty percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-wage workers do not have a single, paid sick day to recover from a short-term illness or to provide care for their loved ones. This leads to impossible choices for moms in the sandwich generation who are often working while serving as the main caregiver for an aging parent or school-age children. Missing just three days of work to care for a kid with chicken pox would mean losing the entire month’s healthcare budget for the average two worker, two child family without access to paid sick days.

Paid sick days legislation would enable workers to accrue paid sick leave and provide for provisions to help employers manage. It also makes economic sense as it costs businesses more in lost worker productivity to have sick employees come in, than it would cost to offer paid time off in the first place.

President Obama has come out in favor of such legislation. Mitt Romney, who claims to understand the plight of working people, has been silent.

The U.S. has the weakest labor protections in the industrialized world, and is the only developed nation that doesn’t guarantee workers some sort of paid sick leave. Lost productivity due to sick workers attending work and infecting other employees costs the U.S. economy $180 billion annually.

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) released the Rebuild America Act, and one of its many provisions would ensure that all workers have access to paid sick days. Inevitably, proposals of this sort draw the ire of Big Business, which claims that every policy meant to aid workers will drive up costs and increase joblessness. But as David Madland noted yesterday, that simply isn’t the case:

The aftermath of the Great Recession has cultivated a fear that policies that support workers and their families will subsequently constrain business profitability and cause employers to lay off workers or close their doors entirely. Contrary to fears from the business community, the passage of paid sick days legislation in San Francisco (the first city to enact such a law) did not hamper job growth. In fact San Francisco created more jobs and experienced more economic growth after passing the law than the surrounding counties without such legislation.

According to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, a lack of paid sick days led to millions of additional cases of H1N1 flu in 2009. Since the federal government hasn’t acted, several cities have passed paid sick day requirements of their own (though Republicans in Wisconsin overrode Milwaukee’s law last year). Harkin’s bill — in addition to its myriad other strong proposals — would end America’s shameful rein as the only developed nation that forces workers to choose between their health and their job.

Our guest blogger is Sarah Jane Glynn, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Just weeks after voters in Denver failed to pass a local paid sick days initiative, a new study to be published in the American Journal of Public Health demonstrates how a lack of workplace policies such as paid sick leave contributes significantly to illness among Hispanics — and thus the general population.

Potential exposure to H1N1 during the 2009 pandemic was significantly related to race and ethnicity, with Hispanics having the greatest risk of infection. Even after controlling for income and education, Hispanics had the highest probability of contracting an influenza-like illness, due to the absence of paid sick leave and structural factors such as the number of children living in the household.

The lack of paid sick leave among Hispanic workers contributed to an estimated 1.2 million cases of influenza-like illness among Hispanics, and 5 million additional cases in the general population.

Nearly 60 percent of Latino workers — about 12 million people — do not have access to paid sick days through their employers. Latino adults are more likely to be in the workforce than any other racial or ethnic group, and they are also more likely to work in service industry jobs such as personal care or food service — jobs where they are in direct contact with the public and where paid sick leave is less commonly offered.

Thus, the person preparing your food at a restaurant is disproportionately likely to be Latino, and is also disproportionately unlikely to have paid leave that would allow him to stay home if he caught the flu. Other research has shown that a lack of paid sick days resulted in employees of all races and ethnicities who were infected with H1N1 going to work while sick, thus infecting an estimated additional 7 million individuals — as many as 1,500 of whom died as a result.

Opponents of the ballot initiative in Denver (which included the National Restaurant Association and Keep Denver Competitive, funded by chains like KFC and Pizza Hut) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars arguing that paid sick days are too expensive in this economy. But the real question — when millions of people are infected with avoidable illnesses, and over a billion dollars is being spent each year on preventable ER visits — is too expensive for whom?

Amongst developed nations, America has the weakest labor protections. In fact, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee its workers some form of paid sick leave, even though sick employees attending work and infecting other costs the U.S. economy $180 billion in lost productivity annually.

To remedy this, some cities have taken matters into their own hands, with Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle passing their own paid sick days requirements. Milwaukee passed its own law as well, only to have it overridden by the Republican state legislature, while Philadelphia is inching closer to crafting a law.

There is even one state that decided to implement a statewide requirement that workers be provided with paid time off to deal with illness: Connecticut. Yesterday, ThinkProgress spoke with Gov. Dan Malloy (D-CT), who signed Connecticut’s requirement into law. He explained that it “makes no sense at all” for sick employees to attend work, particularly when they’re in professions that involve interaction with vulnerable populations:

There’s no doubt that the very nature of biological interaction forces that to happen. That’s why having sick people come to work in hospitals and nursing homes makes no sense at all, and certainly why having those same folks go to work in a daycare facility where you have a particularly vulnerable population makes no sense at all. So I think in some sense, that reality allows us to have more and more people understand what we’re talking about on a public health benefit.

Watch it:

We also spoke with Seattle councilmember Nick Licata, who spearheaded his city’s effort to enact a paid sick days requirement. “I think what’s really important about paid sick leave is that it’s a victory where we’re moving something forward as opposed to a victory where we were stopping something bad from happening,” he said. “We have to start thinking about how to make this country a better nation,” instead of “thinking about how to save the last scrap of food on the table.” Watch it:

A paid sick days initiative will appear on the ballot in Denver in November.

In late June, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter vetoed a bill that would’ve guaranteed paid sick days to employees of many small businesses within the City of Brotherly Love. Nutter justified his action by saying that the bill would have been be too burdensome on businesses.

Now, a Philadelphia woman has lost her job for taking time off to undergo a medical operation that helped save her son’s life. Mother Claudia Rendon had already used up her vacation days for the year after the death of both her mother and uncle and finding out her father had leukemia. But when doctors told her that her son needed a kidney for a life-saving operation, she didn’t hesitate to take some time off from her job at the Aviation Institute of Maintenance for the procedure.

Before she went under the knife, her employer made her sign a paper saying her job would not be guaranteed when she returned. And after she returned to work, she was told that she was fired. Her son, whose life was saved by the operation, is thankful for Rendon’s sacrifice. “She saved my life basically,” he noted. “Who else can say their mom gave them life two times?” The local Fox affiliate covered Rendon’s story. Watch it:

According to research by University of Missouri-St. Louis Associate Professor Kenneth Thomas, the U.S. has the weakest labor protections in the developed world. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not require employers to provide their employees with some paid time off to deal with illness. It is estimated that the lack of paid sick leave costs the United States $180 billion annually in productivity, due to workers coming to work sick and infecting their colleagues.

Earlier this year, Connecticut lawmakers made their state the first in the nation to guarantee sick leave for hundreds of thousands of workers. This week, the Seattle city council voted 8-1 to mandate paid sick days for all firms with more than five employees. The Philadelphia city council is looking for ways to get around the mayor’s veto of the sick day’s legislation, including amending the city’s living wage law to require sick days for city contractors.

In 2008, Milwaukee, Wisconsin became the third U.S. city — after San Francisco and Washington, DC — to require paid sick leave for workers, thanks to a referendum overwhelmingly approved by the city’s voters. However, back in May, Wisconsin’s Republican legislature passed, and notoriously anti-worker Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) signed, a bill that took away the ability of cities to decide for themselves whether they want to mandate paid sick leave.

The sick days law has been tied up in the courts ever since, but yesterday, the Milwaukee County Circuit Court officially said that the state is within its rights to nullify Milwaukee’s law:

After three years of legal and political wrangling over the Milwaukee paid sick-day law that voters approved but business groups denounced, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cooper declared Thursday afternoon: “It’s over.”

In doing so he found the city law, passed by 69% of voters in November 2008 and upheld by the state Court of Appeals in March, was moot because of state legislation approved in April that voided it.

“I don’t feel real good about how this happened politically,” he said in announcing his ruling.

Judge Cooper said the bill was perfectly targeted to negate Milwaukee’s paid sick days law. “You put a bull’s-eye on paid sick days,” he said. The ruling comes on the heels of a few wins by proponents of paid sick days, as Connecticut became the first state to require them and residents of Denver got the issue onto November’s ballot. Philadelphia’s city council also approved a sick days bill recently, only to see it vetoed by Mayor Michael Nutter.

At the moment, the U.S. is all alone in the industrialized world in not mandating some form of paid time off for workers, and the U.S. economy as a whole loses $180 billion in productivity annually due to sick employees attending work and infecting other workers. Lack of sick days is a particularly acute problem in the food services industry (where sick workers attending work is obviously even more problematic). It’s a shame that the anti-worker fervor of Wisconsin’s Republicans goes so far as to nullify a law that the people of Milwaukee clearly wanted.