Valerie Jarrett, the super-secret, low-profile adviser to Barack Obama, put out a piece on LinkedIn Thursday in regard to a problem that has plagued American workers for years.
Yes, according to this post, "... President Obama will call on Congress to pass the "Healthy Families Act", which would allow millions of working Americans to earn up to seven days a year of paid sick time ..."
You remember "sick leave", right? Back in the good old days, you would see employees get a week or two of vacation and a week of sick leave a year, or something like that. Eventually, someone got the bright idea that leave was leave, and that rather than opening the process up to abuse by people claiming to be sick from the beach, many companies simply merged the two into a category called "personal leave", totaling what had been the number of vacation plus sick days You could use it for whatever purpose you wanted, and if it was for illness, the employer would be a bit more flexible in letting you take leave on short notice.
So why, then, does the White House believe there is a need to go back to the old system that distinguishes vacation leave from sick leave? Oh, that's right, they haven't thought that through, because they don't understand the system.
The White House, of course, reads this column religiously, so let me explain to them: If you pass a law that mandates X number of days of sick leave, you can expect that eventually the average amount of earned vacation leave per year will drop by exactly (drum roll) ... X days! Well, duh. We'll go back to the old system and "sick" employees will call in sick from the beach just like it was 1957.
The White House does not, of course, have any advisers on staff who get that, since none has ever run a business -- or anything else. They are proposing this, apart from trying to appear relevant in their lame-duckitude, because to them it is simply a transfer of money (paid leave is money for whatever purpose used) from employer to employee. They detest business, as a competitor to government for the hearts of Americans. Small business is not any different to them from AT&T, GM and Exxon Mobil.
We all remember the law of unintended consequences, of course -- the one that put a bunch of boat-manufacturing employees out of work when Democrats in Congress pushed through a tax increase on luxury boats trying to soak the "rich" back in 1990. We'd like to think that this White House actually cared enough that, if someone explained to them that the law would make no difference, they'd withdraw their support. But this one, boys and girls, is for show only. It won't get close to getting out of committee.
This one is to maintain the front page of the lefty press for a few days. We figure that every couple weeks or so, they'll barf up some new nice-sounding proposal like this, get a lot of headlines, a lot of agitation in their circles, and the proposal will die quietly as soon as it is seen as counterproductive.
But Lord, it would be nice to have even one person in the White House who actually thinks about outcomes.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
No comments:
Post a Comment