Monkeypox cases may be down, but it still can cause economic harm to infected employees

Monkeypox is turning out to be a little less disruptive than first feared. New cases are down 50% since early August. But for those who’ve been infected, the financial toll has been very real.

Monkeypox remains a public health emergency, but the response has been nothing like COVID — especially in terms of financial assistance if people miss work.

“We’re going to tell people that if they get sick with this extra communicable disease they just have to just stay at home without any money and no way to pay their bills?” asked Brenda Waybrant, a labor organizer for restaurant workers in Nashville. “Restaurant workers don’t get money unless we’re in the work.”

GoFundMe is now peppered with pleas for help from those in quarantine waiting until all of the monkeypox scabs are completely healed, which can take a month or more. Some say they have lost jobs; others say they are struggling to get jobless benefits. 

Waybrant said she’s still concerned about workers contracting the virus on the job, even though it’s primarily passing through intimate contact. 

“When people in labs handle monkeypox, they are donned up in personal protection gear. And it just blows my mind that we’re being told to keep our heads down and go to work,” she said.

People don’t seem to be getting monkeypox at workplaces.

“We really have not been seeing transmission from inanimate objects … so sharing pens or door knobs or sitting in a chair in a doctor’s office waiting room,” said Dr. Sean Kelly, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “It really does take that significant skin [to] skin contact.” 

Still, it’s an issue for employers when someone calls in sick with monkeypox. Then, those employers dial attorneys like Kathy Dudley Helms in the South Carolina office of the Ogletree Deakins law firm asking what to do.

“There isn’t anything that says, ‘Oh, if you have to be out of work for four weeks because you have a contagious disease, you can’t be terminated,’” Helms said.

But the tight job market has employers scared about staffing shortages. And COVID changed employees’ expectations of how a boss would handle someone who gets swept up by a public health crisis. 

“What we’re seeing — or going to see — are just more narrow exceptions to any attendance policy,” she said.

But those policy decisions, Helms said, need to be made known to employees before anyone gets sick.