As far as I understand, in other countries that provide, say mandatory maternity/paternity leave, there is a benefit provided by the government that covers at least part of that (not sure about sick leave). Otherwise you kill small businesses. Google can easily afford to cover someone's pay if they are out sick or on parental leave or whatever. A five person shop might not be able to afford to continue paying 20% of their workforce without the work getting done.
The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses.
There are second and third order effects to things like "just make everyone offer paid sick time" that need to be considered.
> The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses.
I don't necessarily agree with this. To attack this argument from another angle, there are many European countries out there that have a thriving small business economy while also placing a lot more societal burdens on them.
In America as we're seeing with the coronavirus, a lot of these small businesses are barely solvent. That's even in spite of us giving them almost no responsibility to their workers, so theoretically the barrier to entry for a small business should be as low as possible. Yet the coronavirus is causing some hefty damage to those smaller businesses because as it turns out, many of them were one crisis away from dying.
I don't think the issue has anything to do with the difficulties of starting a small business but rather the difficulties of having to compete with larger companies which have a lot of their costs negated by the economy of scale they operate at.
I think it's a mistake to confuse parental leave and other forms of extended leave with paid sick days. Any small business should be able to handle a worker out sick for a few days. I agree that when we reach the scale of months, that's a cost better addressed collectively.
The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses.
There are second and third order effects to things like "just make everyone offer paid sick time" that need to be considered.