Debate Over Paid Sick Leave Bill Heats Up at House Hearing
Supporters urged lawmakers at a House subcommittee hearing June 11 to approve the Healthy Families Act, legislation that would require employers with 15 or more employees to provide paid sick leave, while opponents strongly criticized the bill as costly and unnecessary.

Proponents of the bill (H.R. 2460) told the House Education and Labor Committee’s Subcommittee on Workforce and Labor that nearly half of all private sector workers do not receive even a single paid sick day.

“With the economy still struggling to recover, study after study has pointed to cost benefits that paid sick days yield to employers, workers, and taxpayers,” said bill author Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). “When working parents must go to work sick, they risk infecting their entire workplace, then we all pay the price for denying employees paid sick days, especially if they work in health care, child care, or food service.”

The bill, introduced May 18 with 101 co-sponsors, would require employers to provide workers with up to seven days of paid sick leave on an accrued basis.

Accrual Begins Immediately
The measure specifies that workers would earn one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, to a maximum of 56 hours (seven days) per year. Employers could allow workers to accrue sick leave in excess of 56 hours per year, but would not be required to do so.

The legislation also specifies that workers begin accruing sick leave on their first day of employment, and that they become eligible to use the accrued time after 60 days of employment.
Earned sick leave would carry over from one year to the next, but employers would not be required to allow employees to accrue more than 56 hours of earned leave at any given time.

Employees would be allowed to use leave when they are sick themselves, to care for sick parents or children, or to visit a health care provider for a specific problem or for preventive care.
In addition, the legislation specifies that leave may be used for “an absence resulting from domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking,” whether to obtain medical care, obtain “services from a victim services organization,” or to participate in related legal proceedings.

The legislation would allow employers to require workers to provide certification by a health care provider of an illness if they take more than three consecutive days of leave.

“Paid family and medical leave programs help business owners by enabling them to offer policies that help their employees meet the dual demands of work and family,” Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, told lawmakers.

Moreover, Ness said that her group found in a new report, A Health Impact Assessment of the Healthy Families Act of 2009, that guaranteed paid sick days would reduce the spread of pandemic and seasonal influenza.

Ness said the study revealed that more than one third of flu cases are transmitted in schools and workplaces, and that staying home when infected could reduce the proportion of people impacted by pandemic influenza by between 15 to 34 percent.

Opponent Warns of Job Loss
Subcommittee ranking member Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) said that the bill would require countless U.S. employers to provide paid leave for “a range of medical and non-medical conditions great and small.”

“If this were implemented, the costs of government-mandated benefits would be passed on to American workers through reduced wages and fewer jobs,” Price said. “Employers around this nation see this type of legislation, right now, and many have frozen any hiring because they don’t know how severe government dictates will be.”

Price said the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2008, 93 percent of full-time employees were provided paid time off that could be used in the event of an illness, and 51 percent of part-time workers had paid sick leave.

China Miller Gorman, chief operating officer for the Society for Human Resource Management, told lawmakers that employers should decide for themselves how to establish and implement paid leave programs.

A Senate version of the paid leave bill (S. 1152) was introduced May 21

Final words from A Plus Benefits, Inc. We encourage our clients to be politically active. There are two sides to this debate, those who want the government to mandate employee “benefits” and those who don’t. We encourage you to contact your respective representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate and express your particular opinion and support.

Randall Barker is the VP of Human Resources for A Plus Benefits, Inc.