HARTFORD — Wanda Cobbs, of Hartford, is a single mom. She has three children and says money is always tight. <\/p>\n
She works as a school bus driver in West Hartford for First Student, and she says her company does not provide paid sick days for their bus drivers or monitors.<\/p>\n
Cobbs says she cannot afford to stay home when she or her children are sick, and she could have used a few paid sick days last December when her children had H1N1. Cobbs took time off to care for her children, but eventually caught the virus. She said she had to keep working, because she had already lost a week’s pay. <\/p>\n
Cobbs was just one of several people who spoke in support of a bill that would require businesses with more than 50 employees to offer their workers five paid sick days each year. <\/p>\n
Similar bills have been proposed in the past, but have failed to make it to the governor’s desk. <\/p>\n
Advocates say businesses do not benefit when sick people go to work, and they say workers should not have to decide whether keeping their jobs or getting better is more important. <\/p>\n
The bill’s opponents worry that requiring paid sick days is a mandate that would harm the state and make businesses less competitive. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HARTFORD — Wanda Cobbs, of Hartford, is a single mom. She has three children and says money is always tight. She works as a school bus driver in West Hartford for First Student, and she says her company does not provide paid sick days for their bus drivers or monitors. Cobbs says she cannot afford to stay home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}