The Progressive Politics of Happiness

Here of some examples of the kind of policies we should promote:

Paid family leave. Only the United States, Swaziland, Liberia and Papua New Guinea don’t guarantee at least paid maternity leave. Most wealthy countries also offer paid leave for fathers.

Paid sick days. Only a handful of desperately poor countries and the United States, don’t guaranteed paid leave when you’re sick. 86 percent of food service workers get no paid sick days and they come to work sick and get you sick—they can be fired if they don’t.

Paid vacation time. Only the United States, Guyana, Suriname, Nepal and Burma don’t guarantee at least some paid vacation time. Every European gets at least four weeks off with pay a year. We should support the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, sponsored in Congress by a true progressive, Representative Alan Grayson of Florida. It’s a very modest proposal, but a step in the right direction.

Here’s another idea: the choice of shorter work-time. In the Netherlands and some other European countries, workers have a legal right to reduce their hours without losing their jobs. They keep the same hourly pay, pro-rated benefits and full health care. This is an enormous expansion of personal freedom—the right to choose time over money, to select shorter hours of work without losing one’s livelihood.

Each of these policy reforms is essential to good health. Indeed, our lack of these rights is part of the reason Americans have the worst health in the industrial world, despite paying twice as much as everyone else does for healthcare. We are almost twice as likely to suffer chronic illness in old age as Europeans are, for example. Workplace stress in America is a killer, the “new tobacco” in the words of one cardiologist.

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