The case for paid sick days: A letter to Noni

The following video story is from Abigail Echo-Hawk, mother of Noni.

Several months ago, Abigail’s young son Noni son was involved in a hit-and-run bicycle accident, and was seriously injured. Abigail had difficulty taking time off work to care for him:

“All I wanted to do was focus on you. Instead I began a maze of who was going to pay the hospital bills, and how long we could afford for me to stay home with you. If I can’t come into work because you’re sick or hurt, my job doesn’t pay me.”

When workers or their children get sick or are injured in an accident, they shouldn’t have to choose between work and family — a choice thousands of mothers just like Abigail have to make every year.

To learn more about paid sick days for Seattle, go to the Seattle Healthy Workforce website and pledge your support for paid sick days for all workers in Seattle.

Published by waworkfam

The Washington Work and Family Coalition includes representatives of seniors, women, labor, health professionals, children’s advocates, faith communities, low income workers, employers, non-profits and other organizations. We’re working together to make it easier for parents to raise healthy children and care for aging parents; for workers to care for themselves or their partners in the event of a serious illness; and for businesses to offer modern workplace standards that improve productivity and worker health.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: