With the help of the Senate, Joe Biden channeled Ronald Reagan this week in moving to deprive railworkers of the right to strike over a simple demand: paid sick leave. The bourgeois apologetics have flowed more freely than Schramsberg at a Silicon Valley fundraiser. Celeste Drake, director of labor issues for the National Economic Council, told the New York Times, “[Y]ou know, in the end this is the president standing with all Americans.”

Many ridiculous things have been said on this topic but this one may be a winner. There was only one way that the president could have stood with “all Americans” this week, and that would have been to defend the workers who are fighting for every one of us by holding their ground on this critical public health issue: the right to recover — and not spread our illnesses around — when we get sick.

Sticking up for paid sick leave would be a political win, as the issue is well understood and popular. That’s because many of us have the same problem as the railworkers: our bosses won’t pay us to stay home when we’re sick. Americans go to work when they’re sick and send our feverish kids to school because we lack the right to stay home with them. We thus spread germs throughout the community, we take too long to recover, and we neglect our long-term health by skipping doctor visits. The lack of sick leave for workers in this country, then, is always abusive. During the deadly pandemic of the last nearly three years, it’s been downright dangerous.