Sick leave spreadsSick leave spreads

by paul Frumkin


In an online video entitled “Contagion: Not just a Movie,” a New York restaurant cook identified only as Amador talks about having to go to work ill because his employers didn’t offer paid sick leave and he couldn’t afford to stay at home.


“I went to work with a 104-degree fever, with lots of congestion, preparing and possibly contaminating the food diners would eat,” Amador said. “But I had to do it.”


The video, created by advocacy group Family Values @ Work and referencing the pandemic thriller “Contagion,” is just one way in which increasingly organized paid-sick-leave proponents are building support by tapping into fears about public health.


Similar efforts are gaining traction at the state and local levels following several high-profile defeats in New York City, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. In just the past several months, the state of Connecticut and the city of Seattle joined San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in mandating paid sick leave for full- and part-time workers.


Meanwhile, the battle lines are being drawn in Denver as voters prepare to weigh in on a ballot initiative addressing the issue this month. The National Restaurant Association deems the Denver face-off so important, it contributed $100,000 in financial support to the Keep Denver Competitive campaign, a business coalition opposing the initiative.


The NRA plans to take a more active role in such state and local fights in the future, said Rob Gifford, the NRA’s executive vice president for political advocacy.


“The Denver ballot proposal should be viewed in the context of a broader national campaign to adopt paid-sick-leave ordinances,” he said. “It is being coordinated on a national basis, and Denver should not be viewed in isolation.


“It’s an unprecedented attempt to expand mandatory workplace benefits, particularly to part-time workers,” he said. “Most workplace-benefit laws or standards are for full-time employees.”


In addition, bills have been introduced in such states as California, New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, while Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, reintroduced their Healthy Families Act companion bills, which address the issue on a federal level.


Advocates also say they are hoping to reverse the losses in Philadelphia and New York City.


Support for paid sick leave is growing across the country, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work, a network of 15 state coalitions working to promote paid-sick-leave legislation nationwide. 


“It’s difficult for people to stay at home when their livelihood depends on it,” she said. “More and more people see this as a commonsense and cost-effective solution.”


Opponents, however, maintain paid sick leave would have significant operational and cost implications for restaurants — particularly given the current economic climate and the industry’s historically low margins.


In Connecticut, the first state to pass paid-sick-leave legislation, Nicole Griffin, executive director of the Connecticut Restaurant Association, said the law “will impact the [state’s] restaurant industry in a major way” when it takes effect in January.


Passed by a single vote in the state Senate earlier this year, the law requires that employers with 50 or more hourly service employees provide them with paid sick leave accruing at a rate of one hour per 40 hours worked. Once employees have worked somewhere for 680 hours, they can begin to accrue up to five sick days per year.


In addition to costing operators an additional five days of pay per year for each part- and full-time employee, the law will present operational hurdles, Griffin said.


“People will be able to call in sick on holidays or Friday nights, and there will be nothing an employer can do about it,” she said.


Griffin said the effort to pass paid sick leave was spearheaded in Connecticut by an organization called the Working Families Party, which broadcast television ads and picketed restaurants, emphasizing the message that sick workers spread germs to the public. 


“They launched a very aggressive public-relations effort to move this,” Griffin said. 


In Denver the paid-sick-leave movement, Campaign for a Healthy Denver, is led by the local advocacy group 9to5, National Association of Working Women.


Pete Meersman, president and chief executive of the Colorado Restaurant Association, said the group was unable to move the measure through the state legislature or the Denver City Council, so it introduced it as a ballot measure. 


“The people elected to take care of this sort of thing are opposed to it,” he said.


Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a former restaurateur who opened The Wynkoop Brewing Co. in downtown Denver, assailed the effort, calling it “well intentioned but wrongheaded,” and told advocates, “You could not pick a worse initiative at the present time.”


If voted in, the measure would become the toughest paid-sick-leave law in the nation, Meersman said, covering all restaurants, no matter how few workers they employ.


The law would mandate paid sick leave for all employees who work 40-plus hours per year. Each employee could accrue one hour of paid leave time for every 30 hours worked, up to a maximum of 72 hours in businesses with 10 employees or more and 40 hours for businesses with fewer than 10 employees.


In addition, Meersman said employees could take sick leave without providing any prior notice and would only be required to provide a doctor’s note if they were out for three days or more. Also, an employee could carry over up to 72 hours of paid leave to the next year.


“Many of our members are saying it’s just going to become unmanageable,” Meersman said. “Scheduling and customer service will be a real challenge. Some say they will just overschedule and then send [workers] home.”


Meersman said he also has heard from some restaurant companies that have said they won’t open in Denver if the ballot measure passes.


“They’ll open in the suburbs, instead,” he said.


Not all operators oppose paid sick leave, however. Kevin Westlye, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, said his association did not oppose the San Francisco ordinance because “the benefit of keeping sick employees out of the workplace is substantial.”


In Seattle, Makini Howell, whose family owns several vegan restaurants, including Plum Bistro, worked with other city business owners and leaders to help craft the city’s paid-sick-leave measure.


“All of the business owners participating agreed it was a good idea, but we had to figure out how to write it so people would not take advantage of it,” she said. 


“Smaller businesses were saying they couldn’t afford it, but they wanted it to work out,” she said. “So we developed a tiered program.”


Employers will be required to offer a sliding scale of paid sick days to their employees, based on business size. For example, workplaces with between 50 and 249 employees will have to provide at least seven paid sick days per year.


The Seattle measure was signed into law Sept. 23 by Mayor Mike McGinn at Plum Bistro, with Howell looking on.


“I do think it’s necessary,” she said. “You have to treat people the way you want to be treated.”


But while paid sick leave has its proponents within the industry, many operators maintain that it is just too heavy a load to bear, especially during these challenging economic times.


“I think this could end up with employees getting laid off and prices increasing,” Meersman of the Colorado Restaurant Association said. “Somebody is going to have to pay for it.”


Contact Paul Frumkin at [email protected].