In early January my son was floored by the flu for a day. Then I got it and was out of work for a couple of days. And then my wife came down with it and took a sick day.

Our employers understand that a parent needs to be home with a sick child and that a sick worker is better at home, recovering, rather than at work, feeling lousy and getting other workers sick. It is a common-sense idea that should not be at the whimsy of each individual employer, but simply agreed to as the law.

That’s what state Reps. Tami Green, D-University Place, Sherry Appleton, D-Poulsbo, and Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, and state Sen. Karen Kaiser, D-Des Moines, had in mind last week. They introduced an important public health measure – minimum paid sick days.

With the current flu season, public health officials are encouraging ill workers to stay home and get better. But it is one thing to encourage workers to protect themselves and their employers by taking sick leave, and it is another thing if these workers don’t have sick leave. And the damning fact is that in our state more than 1 million workers have no sick leave to recover from the flu or a heart attack, or to care for their own sick children or parents.

We live in a global world. Not only can jobs and manufacturing be moved around easily, but so can viruses. Health experts no longer talk about if the avian flu mutates to human-to-human transmission, but when. And when it does, and when it hits the United States, we will expect sick people to stay away from work while they (we hope) recover.

We also live in an economy in which adults are expected to work. Four out of five mothers of school-age children are in the work force. More than half of moms with infants are working full time.

You can’t just bring a sick child to day care. Child care centers often require children to be symptom-free for at least 24 hours. Otherwise, that sick child spreads germs to the other munchkins. That means that mom or dad has to take time off to care for and be with the child.

But only 8 percent of the lowest-wage workers have paid sick leave. These are many of the folks who work in the accommodation and food service industries, with direct customer contact. When they have to stay home with a sick child, they lose badly needed income or even their job. When these workers are sick themselves, they almost always choose to go to work, bringing their germs with them.

Don’t we live in a country that claims leadership in human rights and dignity? And yet when our legislators propose to enable a worker to take sick leave when he is down with the flu, or when her child has the chickenpox, the top voice for business says that’s a bad idea.

The general counsel of the Association for Washington Business said these types of benefits historically have been “left to the voluntary or collectively bargained agreements of workers and their employers and otherwise dictated by the demands of a free labor market.”

With that reasoning, we wouldn’t have child labor standards or food safety inspections. But those protections came because some businesses turned a blind eye to the health and safety, livelihood and rights of their workers and citizens.

Certainly, when a worker is forced to choose between coming into work sick or staying home and possibly losing his job, his employer has trampled over his health and livelihood. And when a worker is forced to leave a sick child at home in order to protect her job, we are trampling over that worker’s child as well.

A friend of mine, Lynn Wirta, runs a child care center in North Seattle. According to Lynn, “nothing would be more harmful to my business than not providing paid sick leave. Individuals who come to work sick because they cannot afford to lose a day’s pay would spread disease not only to other workers but to the children as well.”

If a small, struggling, nonprofit child care center can figure out how to provide sick leave, then so can all employers. We just have to agree on the law.

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him in care of the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.