You take something highly contagious like H1N1, add a bad economy and throw in the employer practice of not giving sick days, or giving too few to employees:
Public health experts worried about the spread of the H1N1 flu are raising concerns that workers who deal with the public, like waiters and child care employees, are jeopardizing others by reporting to work sick because they do not get paid for days they miss for illness.
Tens of millions of people, or about 40 percent of all private-sector workers, do not receive paid sick days, and as a result many of them cannot afford to stay home when they are ill. Even some companies that provide paid sick days have policies that make it difficult to call in sick, like giving demerits each time someone misses a day.
Public health experts say policies like these encourage many people with H1N1, commonly called swine flu, to report to work despite official warnings from the government and most companies that they should stay home.
Now think about this for a minute. We have extremely high unemployment and you get an employee who has to miss a week or two because of this illness. The employer decides “well I can just fire him and bring in someone for a few dollars less an hour”. So now that sick person is unemployed.
That scenario is the very one that goes through the heads of millions of American workers, on top of wondering how they can pay the bills after missing too much work, or if their health care insurance gets cancelled because of it. Losing your job because of illness is something that is quiet common in the American workplace. So now we got more Americans at risk of contracting the virus because of our screwed up work system here in the United States. This really is a recipe for disaster.