Yes, I really wish that people would just say "Everyone should give their employees paid sick leave because that's the right thing to do, problem solved!" as if businesses were just huge sacks of money. The most affected businesses are apt to be seeing their revenues collapse.
This is a bad time to begin offering workers a new and very expensive benefit that they are more likely than usual to take.
Now a giant corporation with a nice, sloshy reserve fund can do this--and should! (But also, probably already does). But if your business model is planned around *not* paying those benefits, you may well not have adequate reserves for the expense.
Maybe we should have had paid sick leave before--an argument for another day--but don't expect many employers to just add it in the middle of a crisis, when they haven't time or pricing power to adjust profitably. We should avoid, if at all possible, pushing firms into bankruptcy
Instead, the government should step in to provide emergency sick leave. Figure out the rest later.
And by "the rest" I mean--how we avoid picking up the bills of employers who were already providing sick leave.
