Get Paid to Stay Home With Swine Flu?

(MYFOX NATIONAL) - Health officials are telling people with the H1N1 virus to steer clear of the workplace. But what if you don't get paid for sick time?

Across the country, and even in Congress, there is a movement for companies to pay their employees for sick leave. The Washington Post reports that last week, a bill was introduced by members of the House Education and Labor Committee that would require employees with 15 or more workers to provide five paid sick days per year for workers with contagious illnesses like swine flu.

"Sick workers advised to stay home by their employers shouldn't have to choose between their livelihood and their coworkers' or customer's health," Rep George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the education and labor panel, said in a statement.

"On the one hand, you have all of our top officials saying, 'Do the responsible thing. If you're sick, stay home,'" Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, told the Huffington Post . "You have advice from the Centers for Disease Control on exactly how many days you should stay home, and how many days we need to keep kids at home. And at the same time, we have a country where almost half the workforce doesn't have a single paid sick day."

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been lobbying to get his city's workers to have paid sick days. WalletPop reports that two-thirds of workers don't have paid sick days.

But labor groups say that the government could be making things complicated for business owners.

"The more restrictive the government is in how businesses can develop their benefits programs, the less flexible business owners can be," Molly Brogan, a spokeswoman for the small-business group, told the Post. "If it's paid sick leave, you're paying somebody who's not going to be there and you have to pay somebody to replace them. That has the potential to affect the bottom line for a lot of small businesses."

A recent survey found that most human resource managers plan to work with their existing sick-leave policies when it comes to swine flu. But some companies have already modified their policies in light of the swine flu outbreak. The Wall Street Journal writes that Texas Instruments is allowing its workers, including those who are hourly, to take as many days as necessary by borrowing from future allowances to recuperate from the swine flu.

Other companies are doing their best to prepare for outbreaks. Agricultural company Monsanto has an emergency supply of Tamiflu stashed, and pharmaceutical firm Abbott Laboratories is distributing H1N1 travel kits to employees traveling on business.