Calling Out:
A bill that mandates paid sick leave works its way through the state legislature for a second year. Will it pass?
Adam Bulger (Hartford Advocate)

At her last job, Suely Hernandez’s employer wouldn’t let her off sick unless she had a doctor’s note. As a single mother of two young children, she sometimes had to work sick, with unpleasant consequences.

“I had to leave the sales floor to throw up, and my boss still made me stay there,” said Hernandez, a Hartford resident and member of the city’s chapter of social justice group ACORN. In February, she appeared before the state Senate’s labor committee to testify about the state’s need for the paid sick days bill along with other members of ACORN.

For its proponents, the sick leave bill is a necessary measure that workers have a clear and present need for. The bill would require state employers with 25 or more employees to provide employees with paid sick leave at a rate of one hour for 40 hours worked. According to everybodybenefits.org, a Web site established by ACORN to promote the bill, 40 percent of workers in Connecticut don’t receive any paid sick days.

“It’s one of those issues that the more it gets out there and talked about the better its chances become. It’s such a commonsensical idea,” said Jon Green, executive director for Connecticut’s Working Families Party.

The bill’s opponents believe it would unfairly burden the state’s business owners, who they say already do a fair job of providing workers with sick leave without a legislative directive.

“The more you mandate, the less you give businesses flexibility,” Connecticut Business and Industry Association spokesperson Kia Murrell said. According to a March survey of CBIA members, 87 percent of those businesses said  government-mandated paid sick leave would harm their bottom line.

In 2007, when it was first proposed, several high-profile politicians, including Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and Attorney. Gen. Richard Blumenthal turned out in support of the bill. It was passed in the state Senate 23-13, but was never brought up on the house floor.

“Last year, to be frank, it went further than we thought it would go. It’s a big issue. It’s not a minor technical kind of change,” Green said. “It’s uncommon, and a testament to the overall appeal of the issue itself.”

Green said getting the bill through the legislature will be difficult despite its momentum because of this year’s short legislative session.

The CBIA is urging lawmakers not to pass the bill — on its Web site, they’ve tracked its progress and enumerated their criticisms of the bill’s intent. Their March 20 government affairs report decried the bill as a “‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to mandating paid sick leave that will increase business costs, cause workplace disruptions and potentially hurt employees instead of help them.”

While similar measures have been passed in other states and Washington D.C., the Connecticut version of the bill is more far-reaching than others. However, Green emphasized that in a global context, the bill is a necessary corrective.

“The reality is that almost every nation has a policy like this at a federal level. The ones that don’t aren’t countries we should be in the same category as,” Green said. “We joke about how even Kazakhstan has a better sick day [policy] than ours. Borat can get paid sick days, but not us.”