Paid Sick Days

Earlier this week, the California Assembly passed legislation requiring employers to provide all workers with a minimum number of paid sick days. According to the official legislative summary, the bill would require employers to provide an hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked. The legislation doesn't exempt small businesses, although employers with ten or fewer employees could limit employees to five days of paid sick leave in a year (larger employers could limit use to nine days). The bill now moves to the California Senate.

The movement to guarantee that all workers have paid time off for work life balance is gaining momentum.

Washington DC just passed the second local law in the nation (despite the limitations of the provision, this is progress) and New Jersey seems poised to pass a law offering paid family and medical leave.

And finally, check out this innovative use of the web to create on “online rally” for paid sick days.

Spend your lunch break today speaking out for paid sick days for all working people.

Join us virtually at the U.S. Capitol for the first-ever Online Rally for Healthy Families — a special online event hosted by the National Partnership and the Healthy Families Act coalition.

Bring your friends and co-workers along....

You can join the rally by visiting EveryoneGetsSick.org and then share your story, upload a photo, take action, and more.

Color me green – I love this creative use of the available technology.

February 5 marked the 15th anniversary of the enactment of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Elaine Chao and her buddies at the Department of Labor celebrated this momentous occasion by issuing new regs to make it harder for workers to use their twelve weeks of unpaid leave.

Thankfully there are people around the country with some long-term vision who have been fighting to expand the law to cover the 40% of workforce who are excluded from the bill (those who work at firms with less than 50 employees or have been on the job for less than a year).

There are also state and federal efforts to establish paid leave, so that working families can afford to have someone at home to bond with a new baby or care for a sick relative. Paid parental leave laws have already passed in California and Washington state. Since their systems are based on small payroll taxes pooled across the state, there is no exemption for employees of small businesses. While the current draft of the bi-partisan federal bill does not require firms with less than 50 employees to opt into the system, with a little bit of organizing, we can leave Papua New Guinea and Lesotho in the dust.

On Tuesday, the District of Columbia City Council took another step toward passing a law that would guarantee all workers a minimum number of paid days off in the event of illness or domestic violence. The central message of the campaign has been that no one should have to choose between their job and taking care of a sick child, or getting out of an abusive relationship.

While this message resonated in the halcyon days of May 2007, back before talk of a recession and intense lobbying from the Chamber of Commerce, several members of the City Council tried to kill the bill’s momentum by tabling it. Fortunately this effort failed. (We don’t waive the minimum wage every time we hit a recession. Minimum standards are minimum standards.) However, an amendment to reduce the amount of sick leave available to employees working for small businesses was adopted.

In its current state, the bill, which will face a final vote on March 4, would require employers of 24 or less to allow their employees to accrue 3 paid sick and safe days annually. Employers of 25-99 workers, would be required to provide 5 days, and employers of 100 or more workers, 7 days. Part-time workers are included in the bill, and would accrue half of the days of full-time employees. While this is less than what was originally proposed, the bill would nevertheless be a victory for the 210,000 workers who lack paid sick days in DC. And unlike unpaid Family and Medical Leave or the Kennedy-DeLauro paid sick days bill, it would cover part-time workers and employees of small businesses. Minimum standards are minimum standards after all.

When we conducted a nationwide scan for The Mobility Agenda seeking new ideas on improving low-wage work, the strategy we heard about most often was guaranteeing paid time off for all workers. At the time, there was little discussion of this option, but after we talked to workers in Madison, WI and San Francisco, CA about local campaigns to ensure paid sick days, we started tracking new efforts across the country.

The SF campaign succeeded with overwhelming voter support, and the Madison initiative barely missed passage in city council. Since then, news media coverage of the issue has picked up and over 20 other places are considering making paid sick days official by creating a labor standard (like minimum wage) that covers all workers.

Now, there’s news of broad, bipartisan national support offering paid sick days to all workers.

A nationwide poll of 1,200 likely voters expresses strong bipartisan support for federal, state and local efforts currently underway to ensure employers provide paid sick days as a minimum workplace standard. Currently, 48 percent of the nation’s workers have no paid sick days.

Last week in seven states, as part of a nationwide movement, advocates highlighted efforts to ensure that workers are offered paid sick days. And in March, the proposed Healthy Families Act was introduced in Congress.

The poll of likely voters, taken June 20 – 27 of this year, shows that:

• Eighty-nine percent of poll respondents favor a basic labor standard that would guarantee all workers a minimum number of paid sick days.

• There is strong bipartisan agreement for paid sick days, with at least four in five Democrats, Independents and Republicans expressing agreement (Democrats – 94 percent agree; Independents – 90 percent; Republicans – 83 percent).

In addition, the poll results show:

• Support for a basic standard of paid sick days is greatest among younger voters (92 percent) and among African American voters (91 percent) and Hispanic voters (97 percent).

• Nearly one in eight voters (12 percent) surveyed reported that they or another adult worker in their family had been fired or penalized by their employer for taking time off from work to care for a sick family member or recover from their own illness. Among Hispanic and African American voters polled, nearly one in six (16 percent) reported that they or a family member had been fired or penalized for taking sick time off.

For more information, our friends at the National Partnership for Women and Families have posted additional results and information about efforts across the country at www.paidsickdays.org.

It will be interesting to see whether this idea picks up steam in the campaigns, and also whether candidates put this strategy in the context of new efforts to strengthen the economy with a focus on labor market issues (as opposed to say - calling it an "anti-poverty" initiative!). They'll also need to be prepared to deal with the inevitable complaint (see John McCain's statement for an example) that offering paid sick days could hurt small businesses.

A good review from today's CongressDailyPM:

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is headed toward its first partisan collision this year, as HELP Chairman Kennedy plans to reintroduce next month a bill that would require employers with 15 or more workers to provide seven days of paid sick leave annually for full-time workers. The leave requirement would be prorated for part-time workers.

....

When the committee considers the proposal, it is likely also to raise questions about the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires employers with 50 or more workers to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for serious medical conditions or the birth or adoption of a child. Democrats, particularly Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, want to expand the law to cover workers in firms with 25 or more employees. In previous years, Dodd has proposed a pilot grant program under which states would experiment with ways to help employers offer six weeks of partial or fully paid leave for workers. Under Dodd's proposal, states could use wage insurance programs or state unemployment compensation to help fund the paid leave.

Kennedy's paid sick leave proposal also comes on the heels of a Labor Department request for information from businesses about family leave. Comments were due last week. A coalition of women's groups and civil rights organizations is concerned that the Labor Department's action is a precursor to scaling back the act. For example, businesses have complained that the provision requiring workers to be granted intermittent leave is difficult to administer and is abused by workers with physicians' notes attesting to "chronic conditions." Employers want medical certifications for chronic conditions to be renewed every three months and the ability to consult directly with workers' physicians. Women's groups oppose such changes, saying they would impose barriers to workers using family leave.

After being focused on upgrading the site in advance of last Thursday's annoucment of our new partnership with CEPR, I'm now catching up on what happened in Congress last week. The big news was the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act by the House Committee on Education and Labor. EFCA will almost certainly pass the House—a majority of members already are co-sponsors—but it faces a tougher road, and a well-funded business lobbying campaign against it, in the Senate.

Also worth noting is a hearing the Seante Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions held on Paid Sick Days legislation. This chart, included in the very good testimony of Jody Heyman, caught my eye: