The Cost of Employees Isolating or Out With COVID

One of the costs to employers and business owners that most people don’t consider is the cost of having an employee out on sick leave.  While it is necessary for an employee to isolate once that person has contracted COVID19, what an employer pays for that employee being out of service constitutes a loss.

Kevin Herrera

Kevin Herrera, Senator, Business Community

“For one is, you don’t have a surplus of employees, so you employ the employees you need. And so, when any of those employees are out, if they are sick, that puts you in a situation where you are limited to provide those services for which that person is assisting with or the products they are doing, so it is certainly a handicap from that perspective, as well as you still have to pay twenty percent of that cost for the employee, social security covers the other twenty percent. And, you are paying for something that you are not getting any value from, because that employee is not there contributing. Now, for some industries like the BPO, employees are able to work from home, even though they may test positive. I say that, and let me make a clarification, many times when people test positive; they are not necessarily ill, they could feel quite fine. They could have no symptoms, just that they test positive. So, in those cases, especially in the BPO sectors those people could work from home and continue providing the services there. But, in many businesses in the country, they aren’t necessarily able to do that.”