City council members will consider legislation that would mandate paid sick leave for all employees in Seattle; if the bill, which will be introduced later this spring by city council member Nick Licata, passes, Seattle will join just three other cities—Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and San Fransisco—in requiring private employers to provide paid sick days.
According to Marilyn Watkins of the Economic Opportunity Institute, one of several dozen liberal and progressive groups pushing the legislation, more than 40 percent of workers in Seattle—many of them in food, health care, and service jobs that put them in close contact with the public—have no paid sick leave. “There’s a huge public health issue and equity issue.”
Employees could use their sick time to recover from illness, to care for family members, to seek services related to domestic violence or stalking, or to stay home during a public health emergency (like swine flu). Employers could require employees to provide a doctor’s note if they stay home from work for more than three days, but employers who don’t provide health care would have to pay for their employees’ trip to the doctor to get that documentation.
The ordinance would set a range of mandates depending on the size of a business. For very small businesses (under 10 employees), employees would accrue an hour of sick leave for every 30 hours they work, up to 40 hours (five days off) a year. Larger businesses would have to provide more sick leave—up to 72 hours (nine days off) a year for businesses with more than ten employees.
Obviously, Watkins says, “people at small companies get sick just as often, and have kids who are sick just as often” as those who work at big corporations, “but larger companies typically have more flexibility. … There’s a perception that it’s more difficult for small businesses to give people time off,” she tells PubliCola.
Those same small businesses and the groups that represent them have typically been the ones most opposed to medical leave mandates, Watkins says. “Boeing isn’t going to be against this. Amazon isn’t going to be against this. They provide paid leave already,” Watkins says. It’s the startups, the restaurants, and the in-home health care providers, among small, narrow-margin employers, that tend to chafe at government mandates like paid sick leave.
Still, Watkins says that in cities where paid sick leave is mandatory, the sky has not fallen down. In San Francisco, for example, “there was a lot of skepticism about government mandates, but the theories about rampant abuse”—people staying home just because they can—”didn’t pan out.” In fact, the average worker in San Francisco takes just three sick days a year.
The group that’s lobbying for the legislation, the Seattle Coalition for a Healthy Workforce, is holding a town hall meeting to discuss the proposal on Wednesday, May 11, at 5:00 pm at the University Christian Church, 4731 15th Ave. NE.
