Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy announced Tuesday that he had signed into law a bill which requires employers to provide paid sick days to their workers. The bill is the first of its kind in the country. Under the new rules, firms with 50 or more employees are required to provide their workers one hour of paid sick time for every 40 hours worked, up to 40 paid sick hours a year.

Along with Vermont’s single payer healthcare bill, this bill is one of the few bright spots in what has otherwise been a brutal year for poor and working people. Providing paid sick days to all workers has so many far reaching benefits that at least 21 nations already legally require it.

In addition to being fundamentally humane and moral, paid sick days decrease the spread of contagious illnesses. Workers who cannot afford to take time off when they are sick end up going into work despite being ill, potentially infecting those whom they interact with at their jobs. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, highly paid workers are typically already provided paid sick days, and so this bill will have more significant impacts for low-income employees. Ellen Bravo of Family Values @ Work makes the point that it is precisely these kinds of low-income workers — restaurant workers, service workers, and child-care providers — who interact with the public the most, making paid sick days a universal benefit for all of us who can now avoid catching whatever they might have.

As with all worker-friendly improvements — even those as seemingly uncontroversial as this one — business groups claim it will spell doom and gloom for the economy. According to Bridgeport News, the Connecticut Business and Industry Association lobbied against the bill, saying that it would “further hurt the economy and drive away business.” Joe Brennan, a lobbyist for the group, is quoted in the Associated Press story forecasting a coming dystopian world of mandated vacation time and work breaks.

Indeed, what a horror that would be. If Brennan is right, Connecticut’s support for paid sick days may have put it on the precipice of a slippery slope to the humane working conditions already standard across Western Europe.

In addition to Brennan’s unintentionally self-parodying comments, the familiar, less humorous set of business objections were also raised. As mentioned above, the threat of businesses fleeing from the state to escape the burden of providing minimally humane working conditions has been floated out. The bogeyman of higher prices to accommodate the paid sick days was highlighted in the MarketWatch article about the change. The article also featured Heritage Foundation talking points saying that ultimately workers would be forced to pay for the sick days in lost future raises — you know, those raises that fast food workers are always getting.

These lines of rhetoric of course are predictable. The race to the bottom logic so pervades our present political discourse that anyone paying close attention could probably tell you what the business opposition to any given set of worker-friendly initiatives is. But this is nothing new. The history of labor in the United States has been saturated with industry objections to positive worker treatment from the very beginning. As Philip Dray records in his book There is Power in a Union, identical objections about economic destruction were made against the now-celebrated movements to shorten the workday, improve workplace safety, and provide minimal wages.

Initiatives tagged as business-destroying and burdensome share a history with all the great workplace improvements of the last two centuries. Connecticut’s mandatory sick pay initiative is the newest member of that club, and hopefully many more like it — perhaps with identical bills in other states — will soon follow.