Jehan Gordon-Booth, a Peoria Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said at Monday’s bill signing that the law in particular will help low-wage workers, who are those less likely to have paid time off and who are disproportionately Black, Latino, and women. That is stemming from HR departments and also externally from pandemic-era laws that mandate such allowances, Fuerstenberg says.Rep. In 2021, that number was 12%, suggesting that companies are allowing wiggle room for workers who have to care for sick family members. Read More: Back-to-Office Pressure Is Creating a Crisis for Long COVID Patientsįor example, according to a 2018 Mercer survey of employers, 18% of respondents said that sick leave must only be used for employees’ own illness. Rich Fuerstenberg, a senior partner at Mercer Health & Benefits who studies and evaluates benefits among large employers, says that companies are providing more paid absence options for employees by allowing them to use sick time for family members or use vacation time and sick time interchangeably through a paid time off (PTO) plan. Some experts who track benefits trends at the company level say that the available government data do not fully capture the nuances of paid-leave trends, and that many employers are improving leave benefits even as they roll back ones specific to COVID-19. President Biden’s Build Back Better proposal, which failed to gain enough support in the Senate to pass, had a number of social safety net provisions, including an original request for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, which was negotiated down to four weeks before the bill died. Still, Boyens is optimistic that sick-leave protections are moving in the right direction, and that the more state and local governments get on board, the more likely the federal government will take action. It’s a missed opportunity.”ĭid the pandemic catalyze lasting change? “We had a lot of federal, state, and local actions-even private employer actions-in response to the pandemic to provide people with paid leave, but at the topline level, our data show that many workers were still not covered in a way that allowed them to take paid time off when they were sick. has set us up for an economic failure and a public-health disaster,” says Chantel Boyens, a policy associate at the Urban Institute who co-authored the paper. But at the same time, at least 17 states, most of which have no paid leave policies of their own, explicitly prohibit cities and counties from passing paid leave laws at the local level. Currently, 16 states have paid-leave laws, up from 10 prior to 2020, according to a September summary of laws compiled by Stateline, a nonpartisan news service funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts that tracks state policies, and A Better Balance, an organization that advocates for enhanced work-family policies. Some states and smaller jurisdictions established or expanded paid leave laws during the pandemic, providing Americans with scattershot protections depending on where they work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |