On Thursday, the city council of Philadelphia approved, by a vote of 11-6, paid sick leave for employees. The proposal would require businesses with 6-20 employees to provide four paid sick days. Businesses of more than 20 would need to give seven days of paid leave.

But that is unlikely to happen unless one council member switches his or her vote. Philadelphia’s mayor, Michael Nutter, is expected to veto the measure, and the council can only override that veto with a vote of 12-5. Nutter vetoed a similar effort in 2011.

Councilmembers who opposed the measure cited business concerns as the reason why:

Councilman Bill Green was among the ‘no’ votes, fearing a measure requiring businesses to provide earned sick days – up to seven per year for larger companies, and up to four for firms with between six and 20 workers – would kill jobs.

“We need to create a regulatory environment that is good for business. I’ll be voting ‘no’ and I’ll ask my colleagues to do the same.”

There’s no proof that giving employees paid sick leave negatively affects job creation or business growth. In fact, studies have shown the opposite. In San Francisco, for example, businesses expanded more quickly after the city adopted a paid sick leave measure. Still, the effect on business has become a constant sticking point for conservatives.

Aside from the human benefit, there’s also a health prerogative for passing paid sick leave. Eighty percent of low-income workers lack sick days, and many of them work in the service industry where they handle food or interact with customers. When the options are losing your wages for the day or going to work sick, there’s an understandable reason to go in. But it does mean that such workers are much more likely to spread disease, and even force their coworkers to take days off, too.

Our guest blogger is Jane Farrell, a Research Assistant for economic policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Portland became the fourth American city to approve a paid sick days law Wednesday, an important step forward today that will help the city’s workers, employers, and residents. Portland joined three other cities – San Francisco, Washington DC, and Seattle – and one state, Connecticut, in modernizing its workplace policies and acknowledging an important reality: everybody gets sick but no one should be at risk of losing a job, infecting coworkers or customers, or missing a day’s pay because of an illness.

While the economic and social benefits of paid sick days are numerous, Portland City Councilmembers nevertheless weighed the evidence in favor of and against paid sick leave carefully. Ultimately, they unanimously decided that this policy would help make Portland a stronger city and community. Worker-friendly policies like paid sick leave help reduce turnover, saving businesses time and money they might have spent on training, hiring, and replacing employees. It also strengthens worker loyalty and increases worker productivity.

Paid sick leave also helps lower health care costs by reducing the number of costly emergency room visits Portland hospitals will have to finance or subsidize. While 40 percent of private sector workers across the US lack even one paid sick day, Portland residents who previously lacked this protection can now rest easy – and work even more diligently – knowing they are safe and covered.

Our guest blogger is Rachel Curley, an intern at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been described as a “collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators”, is waging a campaign against workers, especially those in minimum wage jobs with few to no benefits.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) recently released a report that tracks “the concrete legislative campaign that ALEC has conducted over the past two years to translate economic ideology into law.” Since 2011, 105 bills “aimed to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the local level” have been introduced in 31 state legislatures, and of those 105 bills, 67 were “directly sponsored or co-sponsored by ALEC-affiliated legislators,” according to NELP. Already, eleven of the 67 bills sponsored by ALEC members have been signed into law.

The report released by NELP highlights three types of bills introduced in state legislatures that reflect “model” legislation already written by ALEC. The report focuses on living wage and prevailing wage repeal and preemption bills, but it also points to other bills designed to repeal, suspend, and weaken state minimum wage laws, as well as ones that weaken overtime compensation policies.

The first one of these preemption bills surfaced in Wisconsin in 2011. The bill targeted a 2008 Milwaukee ballot measure passed with 69 percent of the vote that required city businesses to provide paid sick leave to workers. In response, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law directly nullifying the paid sick leave ordinance. Judge Thomas Cooper of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court upheld the state law, noting that the Wisconsin legislature had “put a bull’s eye on paid sick days” and that the state was completely within its right to void the Milwaukee ordinance.

One sponsor of the bill in Wisconsin was state Sen. Glenn Grothman, a confirmed ALEC member. He previously supported Gov. Scott Walker in repealing the state’s equal pay law by claiming that “money is more important to men” and that “to attribute everything to so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

The strategy of ALEC-affiliated legislators, according to NELP, is to repeal current living wage policies or to preempt city and local governments from “establishing a living wage or prevailing wage policy in the first place.” Living wage and prevailing wage policies require employers who receive local government funds to pay their workers according to the cost of living in the area or industry standards for the region.

Read more

Nearly three million Americans missed work last month, and many of them did so without having access to paid sick leave. About 40 percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-income workers don’t receive a single paid sick day from their employers, forcing them into choosing between their health (or the health of a child or relative) and their paycheck, or even their job.

Democrats have introduced measures to change that, in the process ending America’s tenure as the only developed country that doesn’t require some form of paid leave. But the top Republican on the Senate Labor Committee is having none of it:

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the labor committee, contends such a requirement “would only make a bad unemployment problem worse” by increasing hiring costs.

A favorite Republican claim is that any new business requirement will cause job losses. In the case of paid sick leave, though, the research shows nothing of the sort. Study after study has shown that paid sick leave has no effect on job creation. In fact, San Francisco business expansion picked up after the city required employers to provide paid sick days. The same pattern has held true in early evaluations of Connecticut’s new paid sick leave law.

Republicans, business leaders, and the Chamber of Commerce constantly gripe about paid sick day laws. But the evidence hasn’t borne out their warnings, instead showing that fair labor policy is good for both workers and employers.

The flu epidemic that has swept the nation this winter is expected to be the worst outbreak of the virus in at least a decade, and the flu and other illnesses are hitting America’s workers harder this year than they did in the past. Nearly 3 million workers took time off because of illness in January, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the most in any month since the winter of 2008, TODAY reports:

Nearly 2.9 million full-time workers only worked part-time during the week in which they were surveyed because of illness, injury or medical appointment, the BLS said. Also, more than 1.2 million people were off work for the whole week they were surveyed because they were sick, the BLS said.

That’s the highest level of people calling in sick since February 2008, when 1.3 million people missed a full week of work and 3.3 million full-time workers only worked part-time because of illness.

America’s lack of paid sick leave means many of those 3 million workers likely lost pay by taking time off due to illness, and the number who did take off would likely be higher if more workers had access to paid time off. 40 percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-income workers don’t receive a single paid sick day from their employers; 79 percent of food and restaurant workers have no paid sick time. The lack of paid sick time makes the spread of viruses like the flu even worse: there were an estimated 5 million additional cases of the H1N1 virus in 2009 because workers couldn’t take time off, according to the American Journal of Public Health.

Lawmakers in multiple states and cities have pushed legislation that would provide workers with paid sick leave, but business groups have largely opposed those efforts, citing research that says the legislation would hurt businesses and job growth. Those studies are often flawed, though, as the cost to businesses is relatively small and there is no evidence that paid sick leave causes job loss. In fact, because paid sick leave increases worker productivity and decreases turnover while limiting the spread of outbreaks, it likely provides benefits to both businesses and the overall economy.

Requiring that businesses provide employees decent amounts of sick leave doesn’t cost jobs, according to research by the consumer advocate group Public Citizen. The researchers studied three examples of sick leave policies — the San Francisco paid sick leave ordinance (which requires general paid sick leave), the wider California Paid Family and Medical Leave (which requires paid time to take care of children or sick family members), and federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA, which mandated job-protected, but unpaid sick leave).

In each case, Republicans and industry advocates like the Chamber of Commerce warned that sick leave would kill jobs. In each case, the evidence after the fact proved them wrong.

Take the San Francisco law, both the most progressive of the three laws (in that it mandated paid sick leave for a wide set of reasons) and the clearest case of success. Here’s what Public Citizen found:

[A]fter implementation of the paid sick-leave law, San Francisco experienced an increase in employment. A study by the Drum Major Institute found that employment in San Francisco increased 3.5 percent between the start of 2006 and the start of 2010. In San Francisco’s five closest neighboring counties, employment fell 3.4 percent during the same period. The same study found that despite predictions to the contrary, the number of businesses in San Francisco grew by 1.64 percent between 2006 and 2008 while falling by 0.61 percent in neighboring counties. San Francisco also experienced growth within both large and small businesses, and within the retail and food service industry during this period. (These industries expected to be affected most by the ordinance.)

The impact on businesses themselves was minor. A majority reported that understanding and implementing the ordinance was either “not difficult” or “not too difficult.” Additionally, while only 14 percent of businesses reported a negative impact on profits, more than 70 percent reported that the law had either no impact or a positive impact on their profitability…After its implementation, many small business owners discovered that many of the dire consequences predicted prior to the ordinance’s passage, virtually none of them came to fruition. In 2010, three years after the ordinance was enacted, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce realized there was very little impact on business, noting that “it has not been a huge issue that we have heard from our members about.”

The reason for the gap between industry predictions and reality, as Public Citizen notes, is clear: “Productivity, and thus profitability, suffers when workers are forced to come to work when they are sick. One study on the impact of illness on productivity estimates that businesses lose twice as much money to workers who show up at work while sick then when workers stay home due to an illness.”

Currently, the FMLA does not, as San Francisco does, mandate paid sick leave. For this and other reasons, Congress should consider expanding the FMLA’s protections.

Public Citizen also studied the effect of three other unrelated regulations which business interests decried as job killing, coming to similar conclusions about their actual impact. Their conclusion squares with a wide body of evidence suggesting that overregulation is not the problem holding back American growth and, moreover, that smart regulation can effectively create jobs under certain circumstances.

American workers rarely receive paid sick leave, but cities and states across the country are taking up proposals to mandate that employers pay employees who have to miss work because they are sick. A group of Democratic lawmakers has added Maryland to that list with a proposal that would mandate up to seven earned sick days.

Under the proposal, the leave would be accrued based on hours worked, the SoMdNews.com reports:

The proposal, led in the House by Del. John A. Olszewski Jr. (D-Baltimore), allows all full-time employees to earn an hour of sick time for every 30 hours worked, or up to seven sick days per year. Part-time workers would earn fewer days, depending on how often they work.

Nearly 40 percent of America’s private sector workers do not receive paid sick leave, and the number swells to 80 percent for both low-income workers and food workers, 60 percent of whom said they have reported to work even while sick. A 2011 study found that 40 percent of Maryland’s private sector workers don’t receive paid sick leave.

The lack of such leave jeopardizes the health and safety of other workers — in 2009, it led to an addition 5 million cases of the H1N1 flu virus, according to estimates.

Business groups have targeted paid sick day legislation with faulty studies, but in other areas where paid sick leave is being considered, studies have shown the legislation would have little effect on labor costs. The Main Street Alliance of Oregon, a supporter of Portland’s paid sick leave proposal, estimates it would add no more than 1.9 percent to labor expenses for the city’s businesses.

Connecticut’s paid sick days law — which requires businesses in the service sector with more than 50 employees to allow their workers to accrue at least one hour of paid sick leave for every 40 hours they work — went into effect in January 2012. This week, the Employment Policies Institute released new “research” on the implementation of the law, arguing that it’s hurt the state.

But it is difficult to refer to this as “research” with a straight face, since the group is a shell corporation for big business interests and the report repeatedly asserts that the data is “not representative.” The Employment Policies Institute has released similarly dubious reports arguing against raising the minimum wage, and against the Affordable Care Act. Its founder Rick Berman, was a lobbyist for the food, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries, and has been publically accused of using his non-profit shell organizations to benefit the for-profit clients for which he lobbies.

Amongst the report’s problems, data collection began in April 2012, four months after the implementation of the law and, due to the requirements of the legislation, before most full-time workers could have used any of the sick days earned. The initial survey was sent to businesses identified as “most likely to be impacted by the law” but nearly half (45 percent) of respondents did not have to change their policies in order to comply with the law — yet they still were included in the results saying negative things about the effects of the legislation.

The report claims that businesses are laying off workers and limiting expansion, but rigorously collected data from the Connecticut Department of Labor shows employment growth in the Leisure and Hospitality and Education and Health Services sectors since the law went into effect — two sectors that had the largest numbers of workers without paid sick days prior to passage of the law.

Read more

Our guest blogger is Sarah Jane Glynn, an economic policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

President Clinton signs the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.

Twenty years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed his first law: the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The law, still the only one that is explicitly aimed at helping workers manage their work-life balance, provides unpaid leave for workers to recover from a serious illness or care for a new child without worrying about losing their job.

The law was a huge step forward at the time, and has been used 100 million times since its enactment. However, the law does not go far enough. Here are some of the reasons it needs to be updated:

1. It doesn’t cover 40 percent of workers. Due to FMLA restrictions, 2 in 5 workers are not eligible for its protections. Small businesses are exempt from the law, and employees need to have worked “a minimum of 1,250 hours in the 12 months before their leave is to begin” for FMLA to apply. According to the Department of Labor, more than 6 percent of workers “had an unmet need for leave in the past 18 months.”

2. It doesn’t cover care for a grandparent, same-sex partner, or many others. Workers are not eligible to use FMLA leave to care for “parents-in-law, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, domestic partners, or same-sex spouses,” ignoring the reality of today’s families.

3. Many workers can’t afford to use unpaid leave. Nearly half of workers who don’t access leave for which they are eligible say they do so because of the cost. The U.S. has no national policy regarding paid sick leave, which would give workers the opportunity to take time off while sick without worrying about losing their pay along with it.

4. The U.S. isn’t keeping up with the rest of the world. The U.S. is the only developed country that fails to provide some form of paid sick leave and is one of only three countries on Earth that doesn’t require paid maternity leave. As Bryce Covert noted at The Nation, “single parents in this country are the worst off compared to 16 other high-income countries, despite the fact that we have the highest rates of single parenthood.”

As Sarah Jane Glynn noted in the Atlantic, “36 percent of American workers over the age of 18 do not have access to any form of paid leave at all — not paid sick leave, not paid parental leave, not paid vacation.” FMLA was certainly a move in the right direction, but there’s still significant room to make policy that helps workers today.

Our guest blogger is Jane Farrell, a research assistant for economic policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

It seems that the U.S. is set up for a double-whammy outbreak of illness this winter — after enduring one of the worst flu seasons in years, America now faces an especially vicious strain of the highly contagious norovirus, also known as the stomach flu. This strain, “GII.4 Sydney,” originated in Australia and just made the leap to the U.S. after tearing through Britain, France, and New Zealand.

Unfortunately, the United States has yet to employ one of its best defenses against spreading this illness and other contagions more widely: universal paid sick leave.

Norovirus causes stomach pain, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. It is easily spread from person to person or through contaminated food or dirty surfaces. About 21 million Americans contract it annually and of those infected, approximately 70,000 are hospitalized and 800 die. The elderly and very young are especially at risk once infected.

According to the Centers for Disease Control:

Most (72 [51%]) of these GII.4 Sydney outbreaks resulted from direct person-to-person transmission; 29 (20%) were foodborne, one (1%) was waterborne, and the transmission mode was unknown in 39 (28%) of the outbreaks. Long-term–care facilities and restaurants were the most frequently reported settings, accounting for 91 (65%) and 18 (13%) of the GII.4 Sydney outbreaks, respectively.”

There is no vaccine for norovirus and no drug available to treat it.

Unfortunately, nearly 40 percent of U.S. workers who care for the elderly lack even a single paid sick day. While caregivers are presumably putting their patient’s health ahead of their own and staying home if they are sick, these oftentimes low-wage workers will suffer disproportionately if they miss even a day’s pay.

Moreover, only one-third of workers in service occupations have paid sick days. Nearly 80 percent of those working in the Leisure and Hospitality industry lack this benefit. This means that the people preparing restaurant meals or cleaning hotel rooms have good reason to come to work sick. The U.S.’s lack of paid sick leave is out of line line with all other highly developed nations.