This isn’t a meme, do it.
M - Mandatory
I - Indefinite
T - Term
C - Coverage
H - (for) Hospitalization
The MITCH act is a guarantee for your employment, salary and relief from any required government service/appearance, for the duration of time required for you to fully heal and recover from injury/illness, in home or medical facility, while under the active care of a licensed physician.
P.s. And since we are requiring that doctor as well, we’re going to need to just offer universal healthcare for all as an add on, m’kay.
Don’t stop there.
My grandfather was at one point a regional manager for a coffee distributor. He got cancer. The company was self insured in such a way that they had to foot his medical bills. They did.
Post recovery, my grandfather describes his remaining time with the company as miserable. For example, they reassigned him to a notoriously bad region while not providing any relocation assistance. Expectation likely being that he would underperform as a remote manager for their worst region. He didn’t.
Following about six months of a toxic work experience, they took him out to dinner to let him know in public that his role was being discontinued. He wasn’t being fired, but he’d be required to accept a demotion into a sales position if he wanted to stay. He did not stay.
Decades later, one of the C-suite members retire. My gramps was close with this guy, who could not speak “off the record” until now. The guy said that C-suite had it out for gramps, viciously so. They wanted him to quit, because they knew that cancer often comes back. They did not want to pay another set of medical bills, so they made gramps life miserable to try avoiding the potential expense.
So, how do you protect people like my gramps in this situation?
Your solution is still better than nothing, but it should go further.
Yet another reason to be dissatisfied with employer provided health insurance. They want to be the provider of health insurance coverage so that its availability can be used as leverage against workers, and if you need to actually use in any significant way you’ll be punished.
That’s not how America works.
America needs to better deal with the selfish and cruel within it.
Democrats will call this a fringe idea even though European countries already do it. The overton window has shifted; we consider far-right policy (like building a wall across the border) but we can’t afford universal healthcare and parental leave.
They don’t have the balls to do that. But it would be hilarious.
Mandatory Insurance for Time-off, Caregiving, and Health (MITCH) Act
Yes.
Unfortunately, conservatives believe in hierarchy. There are different rules for different people and, to them, that’s good, right, and natural.
They don’t see it as a contradiction because to them it is not. Mitch gets time off because he’s special and deserves it.
Without cracking that world view, progress will be very limited.
This is what people don’t get.
Republicans love being stepped on because those doing the stepping are rich and therefore smarter and therefore in a higher social bracket and therefore allowed to do whatever they want. They only care when they specifically are the ones in the crosshairs. No amount of empathy politics or fairness matter, because they “earned” their right to be an asshole (by cheating and exploiting labor, but they arent ready for that conversation)
I’m for better paid leave. But do companies pay it or is there a national fund? Because as someone who runs a very small nonprofit organization that feeds our community with a handful of employees, if three of them went out on paid leave and I had to pay them plus temporary replacements long term, we would go under. There’s a reason we don’t have more employees. We paid two people on long term leave last year for good reason, and we lost 65% of our savings.
Whatever works for Europe, let’s do that.
Eh, I’ve lived there a couple of times. They don’t have everything figured out.
Sure, that’s kind of a truism. But I really, really struggle to find one thing* that the United States, as a nation, does better than, say, Germany or the Netherlands.
(* ) Here I’m restricting myself to stuff that the people benefit from obviously. The US is really good at killing civilians in other nations, they’re really good at holding the world economy hostage, that sort of stuff, but not anything that actually matters to people who live in the US.
I’ve lived in both Germany and the Netherlands, a year in each. I think you just see them with rose colored glasses. I have many criticisms but I’m not trying to tear anyone down. People love to tear the US down because we dominate the world in many ways.
