Walmart COVID Leave Policy doesn’t pay employees if they get COVID.
I noticed that they stopped doing it in March, stating that the leave of absence policy had cost them $400 million in paid time off, so if it happens to you now, you’re just entirely on your own.
My spouse works at Walmart, so it looks like he just won’t get paid until he’s well enough to return to work. Lucky for us, we have some money in the bank and even if that wasn’t enough, I could keep things moving along until we get our tax check and cash out some savings bonds. This is very unusual for a household that has one person working at Walmart though. And so I can shrug and say “At least our income taxes won’t be so bad next year.”.
The CDC and the doctor (who prescribed Paxlovid) said take 5 days off and go back on Sunday.
The CDC bases the “5 days” advice on the 5 days where you’re “the most contagious”.
However, most Walmart workers can’t afford to take an unpaid week off work, so the two that came in and knew they had it were probably just trying to make money and hope that none of their coworkers, who now have it, would notice.
And they ended up causing a superspreader event that has several people at the local store out sick with COVID, plus however many of their family members come down with it.
The disruption to Walmart’s long term profitability of not giving any leave for vaccine side effects or COVID itself is going to be worse for the bottom line than just paying it out as a form of Short Term Disability, but we live in a society that’s being super cruel to service workers, and then the problem rebounds onto everyone.
One of the reasons I rushed down to Highland Park and got him on Paxlovid is that we have to get this under control as fast as possible. Every day he’s off work does cost us more.
The government didn’t make that easy. As I said in my last post, all of the test-and-treat centers are in rich cities. They don’t have a single one in the city we live in. Population 90,000.
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