Paid Sick Leave Hasn't Harmed D.C. Businesses

MBTPI strongly supports legislative proposals requiring employers to provide workers with earned sick and safe leave. This critical public health tool allows employees to attend to health needs for themselves or their children, thus protecting coworkers, classmates, and business customers from communicable illness. Overall, earned sick leave would lower health care costs and improve workplace well-being and productivity. According to a report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), if a law guaranteeing workers this right were to pass in Maryland, health care expenses in the state would fall by $41 million annually, with roughly half the savings returning to taxpayers.

Unfortunately, the Maryland Earned Sick and Safe Leave Act (House Bill 735/Senate Bill 703), which would have allowed workers to earn a minimum of one hour of paid sick leave per 30 hours on the clock, failed in committee last session. Critics of the bill claimed the law would impose too great a burden to small businesses, though the IWPR report disputed that and a large majority of Marylanders supported the bill according to independent polling.

While initiatives have been introduced in several states in the past few years, Connecticut remains the only state to have passed such legislation (it did so through a close vote in 2012), but several cities, including San Francisco and Washington D.C., have had such requirements for over half a decade.

Effective in May of 2008, the District of Columbia's Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act mandates that employers offer one hour of paid leave to workers for every 37 to 87 hours worked (depending on the size of the company) to workers that have been employed at that firm for at least one consecutive 12 year period.

For the first time since its enactment, the D.C. Auditor has now studied the economic impact of the law on the private sector. The report, which was released Wednesday, includes the results of a survey sent to 800 D.C. businesses that asked owners if paid sick leave would lead them to move their firm out of the District, to which over 87 percent responded in the negative. The audit further found that this new law did not discourage new businesses from forming in the District, and 91 percent of employers in the District complied with the law's requirement of posting the notice of sick leave rights within the workplace.

This provides strong evidence that sick leave laws do not create excessive burdens on small business, which advocates can point to in this coming session should related bills be reintroduced.