She has sent workers home after they came in sick — and felt guilty for doing so because she knew they'd miss pay.

"When I feel sick it's like, 'Oh god, I really need to pay my bills,'" she said.

A Pandora spokesperson said the company offers 40 hours of paid sick leave to full-time employees a year.

(Burger King franchise owners set paid sick and Covid-19 leave policies, a spokesperson said.)

"I feel like I'm playing Russian roulette with my life going in to make hamburgers and fries for $11.15 an hour," said Thompson, a member of Fight for $15, which advocates for stronger wages and benefits for workers.

Omicron and skeleton staffing

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic or Omicron variant emerged, the lack of paid sick leave and the service sector's short-staffing model caused economically insecure workers to work, despite being sick, said Daniel Schneider, a sociologist at Harvard University.

"Stores ran short staffed as a matter of business," said Schneider, who is also the co-director of The Shift Project, which surveys tens of thousands of retail and fast food workers at top chains.

The number of hours worked also often determines whether workers qualify for health care and other benefits through their employers.

The pandemic and Great Resignation phenomenon have worsened the problems created by the lack of paid sick leave for workers and pressure to work due to skeleton staffing levels.

Today, "workers don't feel like they have any more access to paid sick leave than they ever do," Schneider said.

Additionally, "this short-staffing issue has reached this crazy tipping point."

Around 65% of the 6,600 hourly workers who reported being sick for any reason, not just Covid-19, in Shift Project surveys taken September through November worked anyway.

When asked the reasons why they did so, 55% of them said they needed the pay and 30% said it was because they didn't have paid sick leave.

But staffing also impacted their decisions to come into work sick.

One of the employees protested that he was back working so soon, so the store sent him back home.

Albertsons, the owner of Vons, did not immediately respond to request for comment.

'Losing pay or going to work sick'

At the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, Congress passed legislation temporarily requiring employers with fewer than 500 workers and all public employers to provide up to two weeks of paid sick leave to workers who contracted Covid or were waiting for test results and quarantining.