In our always-on-the-go American society, we are increasingly under pressure not to miss a single day of work, and so we find ourselves more and more often going in to the workplace when really we should be staying at home recuperating and keeping our infectious selves away from our healthy fellow workers.
We find ourselves propping ourselves up with increasingly potent cocktails of flu and cold medicines, just so that our projects don't miss their deadlines and we can meet our commitments, or face swift replacement in the next offshoring initiative.
By going in to the workplace in this hyper-medicated state, we manage to get through the day appearing healthy, while silently infecting our unwitting co-workers. These co-workers in turn become ill, resort to the same tactics as us in trying to keep up their productivity, and become the next agents of the virus' spread.
In all of this infecting-and-medicating that goes on in the American workplace, the pharmaceutical companies rake in massive amounts of profit. Clearly, it is not in their interests for American corporations to have liberal sick leave policies that allow employees reasonable time to heal and avoid spreading their contagions. Perpetual illness and misery is a gold mine for these companies.
Think about that the next time you contemplate not using a sick day and instead forcing yourself to make it in to work by medicating away your symptoms.