Last month, Connecticut became the first state in the nation to legally guarantee workers paid sick days. This week, the Massachusetts Legislature will take up a similar bill, at a July 14 hearing of the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development.
The Massachusetts bill would allow workers up to seven paid sick days a year, accrued at the rate of one hour for every 30 worked, to be used to care for themselves or a family member or to attend medical appointments. It would apply to all workers, in both the public and private sectors.
The bill is backed by groups including the Mass. AFL-CIO and MomsRising, which advocates for family-friendly public policy. According to the bill, almost half of Massachusetts workers get no paid sick time, with the lowest-paid workers least likely to get the benefit. About 20 percent of employees who do get sick days are not allowed to use them to care for a sick child or other family member.
Supporters say guaranteeing workers paid sick time would have both immediate benefits for individual workers and far-reaching benefits for the general public and for employers. It would allow people to get preventive healthcare, avoiding more serious—and costlier—health issues down the road. It would prevent employees from showing up at work sick, or sending their sick children to school or day care, and therefore cut down on the spread of infectious diseases. It would improve worker productivity by ensuring that people are coming to work healthy. And it would save money for everyone: “Routine medical care results in savings by detecting and treating illness and injury early and decreasing the need for emergency care. These savings benefit public and private payers of health insurance, including private businesses.”
The bill also makes special mention of victims of domestic abuse, who could use the sick days to get medical care, go to court, or move themselves and their family out of a dangerous situation. “Providing paid sick days would mean important job security for domestic violence victims, as between a quarter to a half of all victims of domestic violence lose their jobs,” the bill says.
Local backers of the House version include state reps Brian Ashe (D-Longmeadow), Cheryl Coakley-Rivera (D-Springfield), Sean Curran (D-Springfield), Peter Kocot (D-Northampton) and Ellen Story (D-Amherst). Coakley-Rivera is also House chair of the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development, which will hold this week’s hearing. State Sen. Stan Rosenberg, an Amherst Democrat, is a sponsor of the Senate version. The bill also has the backing of the Patrick administration.
Fighting against the bill are employer groups, especially those representing small business owners, who say the mandate would put too much financial pressure on their companies. “I think it’s one of the worst things we can do for small businesses,’ Bill Vernon, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, told the Boston Globe this spring.
The Associated Industries of Massachusetts also opposes the bill, arguing that such a requirement would ” cause further job losses, hold back new hiring and wage growth, create a new area of potential (and inevitable) abuse, and add yet again another reason not to do business in Massachusetts.”
Those kinds of arguments led to the watering down of the paid sick days bill that passed in Connecticut last month. The new Connecticut law, which goes into effect Jan 1., passed in a 3 a.m. vote, after 11 hours of debate along mostly partisan lines, with Republicans and conservative Democrats unsuccessfully joining to defeat it. They did, however, manage to water down the original bill.
The Connecticut law allows workers an hour of paid sick time for every 40 worked, to a maximum of five sick days a year. It applies only to service workers (a category that includes food service workers, cashiers and nursing aides, among other groups) at businesses with 50 or more employees. The law exempts manufacturers and nonprofits as well as day laborers, temps and independent contractors.
Advocates of the Massachusetts bill have spent the days leading up to the Statehouse hearing rallying supporters to contact their representatives. Activists from MomsRising were preparing to hand-deliver a “summer reading assignment” to legislators, with stories collected from Massachusetts families about why sick leave is important to them.
