If you’re not a germ-a-phobe already, you might become one if you see the new movie “Contagion,” the story of a fast-spreading, deadly, worldwide epidemic spread by a single touch. The science thriller remains fiction, so far. But there’s a real movie that will give you a fright, too.

If the nation’s workers had access to paid sick days—today, 44 million workers don’t—it would mean a dramatic  drop in hospital emergency room visits and save about $1 billion a year in health care costs, according to a new study due to be released this week.

Connecticut has become the first state in the nation to have a law requiring employers to provide paid sick days, and efforts to pass similar legislation are under way in several cities and states including Denver, Seattle, New York City, Massachusetts and Georgia. Only two cities in the nation, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have paid sick leave laws on the books.

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D) last night vetoed a paid sick leave bill passed by the City Council that would have made Philadelphia the third city in the nation guaranteeing workers paid sick leave. Says AFL-CIO  Secretary-Treasurers Liz Shuler:

It’s a shame the mayor ignored what the majority of Philadelphians say is the right thing to do for working families. When workers in the city get sick, they are still faced with the awful choice of their health or their paycheck. The mayor could have changed that.

Workers at the top of the wage scale are more than four times more likely to have paid sick days than workers toiling near the bottom wage scale, says a new Economic Policy Institute (EPI) Economic Snapshot.

More than 44 million private-sector workers in the United States—­42 percent of the private-sector workforce­—don’t have paid sick days they can use to recover from a common illness like the flu, according to new research by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).