Paid Sick Leave Sparks Debate in New Hampshire and Across the Country
SICK DAYS
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joseph Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
12/08/09
WASHINGTON – The customers at Arthur’s Market in Rochester, N.H., are buying less of the store’s specialty meats and produce lately, straining co-owner Kathy Gagnon’s ability to keep a staff of 18 people employed. And so she casts a skeptical eye toward efforts to mandate that companies provide paid sick days.
“It would cost me a fortune, and I’m barely getting by as it is,” Gagnon said in a telephone interview. “I’d probably have to replace some of them myself and work more than the 70 hours a week I already work.”
Employees are also struggling in today’s economy, and Jenn, a Granite State retail worker, recently lost two and a half days of pay because her employer does not provide paid sick days. First her 4-year-old daughter caught the seasonal flu, Jenn said, and she lost a half day of work because her husband, who works in marketing, couldn’t skip a series of meetings. Then Jenn herself fell ill and missed two days of work.
“I live paycheck to paycheck, so we’re basically your typical middle-class family,” said Jenn, who requested that only her first name be used for fear of upsetting her employer. “It’s not like we make any surplus income.”
Legislation in New Hampshire, Washington, D.C., and cities and states nationwide that would force all but the smallest companies to pay workers for a set number of sick days each year is drawing fire from businesses even as the H1N1 flu pandemic provides momentum for worker advocates who’ve been pushing reform for years.
Advocates argue that current federal law – The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 – does not go far enough in protecting sick workers. The law provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for employees of companies with 50 or more employees. Pointing to studies that show 60 million Americans go without paid sick time, supporters consider the issue a fundamental workplace right.
“The idea that people are working in this country with no paid sick leave is pretty foreign to the environment we work in,” said Mark MacKenzie, president of the New Hampshire AFL-CIO. “There’s a place where governments have a role. One of the places is to figure what is good public policy.”
Critics counter that the government should leave employee benefits to negotiation between employers and their workers. They fear that mandating paid sick leave would hurt businesses like Arthur’s Market, which are already struggling to earn a profit.
“It is inappropriate for government to be trying to mandate a one-size-fits-all benefit plan for employers in the private sector,” said David Juvet, senior vice president of the Business and Industry Association, New Hampshire’s statewide chamber of commerce. “This is not the right time to be putting additional costs on the small-business community.”
State Rep. Mary Stuart Gile, a Merrimack Democrat, introduced a bill in January to give five days of paid time off to workers at New Hampshire businesses with 10 or more employees. After negotiations weakened the mandate, the bill stalled before Thanksgiving in a House committee, where it was sent for more study.
Nikki Tobiasz Murphy, director of the New Hampshire Women’s Lobby and campaign manager for the Gile’s legislation, said opposition concerns are overstated because both the state bill and a broader national bill – the Healthy Families Act – take into consideration employers that are already offering paid time off as a benefit that can be used at an employee’s discretion.
“It will not be a human resources nightmare,” Murphy said. “We do not want to penalize businesses in any way that are already doing best practices.”
In addition to bills working their way through Congress, 12 states, including every one in New England, are considering action on paid sick days. San Francisco, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., have enacted similar laws.
Kristin Smith, a family demographer at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, said the paid sick leave effort has gained a lot of visibility because President Obama and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have urged people to stay home from work or school if they have flu-like symptoms.
“This has been an issue for a long time, and maybe it’s gaining more momentum because of H1N1, but I don’t know that it’s been an effective tool,” Smith said.
Along with the Healthy Families Act, which was originally introduced in Congress five years ago and would mandate up to seven days of paid sick leave for businesses with 15 or more employees, there are also two pending emergency measures focused on containing the H1N1 outbreak.
U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., said he is skeptical of assertions about the innocuous nature of both the Healthy Families Act and the two emergency bills, and has decided to adopt a wait-and-see stance.
“If it makes workers more productive, I think it’s good for business, although it imposes some burdens on business,” Hodes said. “I am concerned, especially at this time, with a fragile economy.”
Advocates argue that having millions of Americans without paid sick time actually hurts businesses because of what they term “presenteeism” – when employees show up to work sick so they don’t lose pay and end up infecting their fellow workers.
Yet those on the front lines of human resources at small-to-mid-size companies, even those that offer some form of paid time off, worry about the economic impact of any new benefits laws.
At Bancroft Contracting Corp., a Maine construction company with a permanent field office in Berlin, N.H., which already provides some paid time off, human resources head Harold Skelton said, “We don’t have money like that to throw around.”
Skelton, who oversees about 150 employees, cautioned that “something would have to give. That’s really a considerable impact on our bottom line.”
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