Chicago employers should allow workers to earn at least five paid sick days a year, according to recommendations by a mayoral task force that could revive efforts to mandate paid sick leave in the city.
The scheduled Sunday release of the Working Families Task Force report comes as more cities adopt earned sick leave laws that would particularly affect low-wage workers, nearly 80 percent of whom don’t receive paid sick time and often can’t afford to forgo a paycheck.
“It is unacceptable that more than 200,000 workers in Chicago cannot take a sick day without worrying about losing their job or being unable to pay their bills,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement announcing the recommendations. “This task force report provides the city with a road map for ensuring that our working families receive this important protection.”
The task force, convened last summer, was charged with studying paid sick leave, scheduling predictability and paid family and medical leave policies to address growing concerns about the juggling of work and family obligations.
It was formed shortly after a nonbinding February 2015 referendum in which nearly 82 percent of voters citywide supported the adoption of paid sick days for workers.
Offering paid sick leave would add 0.7 to 1.5 percent in labor costs for most employers, depending on size and usage, according to an analysis completed for the report, which is meant to serve as a blueprint for a city ordinance. The city also hopes to engage county and state leaders in discussions on the topic.
The recommendations reflect a consensus among a “significant majority” of the 27 members of the task force, which includes business, government and worker representatives, though not everyone endorsed them, said Anne Ladky, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group Women Employed and co-chair of the task force.
Both the Illinois Retail Merchants Association and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce oppose the recommendations.
“Businesses are at a tipping point and these proposals will only exacerbate the problems facing employees looking for more hours and higher wages,” said Rob Karr, president and CEO of the merchants association. “We cannot provide the jobs, pay the wages and invest in local communities while City Hall layers on one cost after another and chases sales out of the city. These policies will not result in more jobs being created or higher wages — just the opposite. City Hall needs to remember that the overwhelming majority of Chicago’s business owners are working families too.”
The task force met with 14 focus groups and heard testimony from academics and policy experts as it deliberated, striving to balance workers’ needs with business concerns, Ladky said. “It really is a balanced report,” she said.
The report proposes employers allow workers to earn an hour of sick time for every 40 hours worked, up to five days in a year, and to roll over up to 20 hours of unused sick days to the following year. It applies to employers of all sizes.
New hires wouldn’t be able to use sick days until they’d worked for 180 days, which would exclude many short-term, seasonal, and temporary employees.
The report also recommends letting employees bank up to five days of their earned sick leave to use for purposes of the Family and Medical Leave Act, such as to care for a newborn or seriously ill family member.
Employers would not have to pay out unused sick days upon an employee’s exit from the company. Employers that lump sick days into general paid-time-off benefits wouldn’t have to change anything as long as the benefits include at least five days off. Sick leave benefits negotiated as part of collective bargaining would be exempt.
The recommendations are slightly more conservative than a 2014 proposed city ordinance that never got to a vote. That proposal called for an hour of sick time earned for every 30 hours worked, up to five days a year for employers with fewer than 10 workers and nine days for larger employers.
More than 20 cities and four states have adopted paid sick leave laws. President Barack Obama in September issued an executive order mandating federal contractors provide their employees with at least seven days of paid sick leave annually.
“This is extremely important for lots of different kinds of workers, but certainly for the service sector this is critical,” said Adam Kader, worker center director of Arise Chicago, a nonprofit which was part of the Chicago task force and has been advocating for paid sick leave for three years.
In the U.S., 61 percent of employees could take paid sick leave in 2015, up from 50 percent in 1991, but access to sick leave is uneven. While more than 80 percent of management and professional occupations have paid sick days, the rate is just 40 percent in service occupations and 38 percent for construction, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A report from Women Employed estimated 460,000 private-sector workers in Chicago don’t have access to paid sick days. Another report, from the National Partnership for Women & Families, put the number at 2.1 million people in Illinois.
Workers without paid sick leave are three times more likely to delay medical care, and their families are two times more likely to delay care, than people with access to paid sick days, according to a new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University and Cleveland State University.
In addition to the risk to health, it can be a cost to business. Showing up to work unwell is estimated to cost business $150 billion a year. Infected food workers are the primary cause of 70 percent of norovirus outbreaks from contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ana Laura Lopez, who worked for 10 years at a thrift store where she got no sick days, hopes the recommendations lead to a new law.
She remembers getting a call from her son’s school while she was at work asking her to pick him up because he was sick. Her boss told her to return right away, but she had no one else to watch her son that afternoon or the next day when he was too ill to return to school. When she returned to work the following day her boss gave her a warning and said that if it happened again she would be fired.
“Sometimes they forget we are human beings, they see us like a machine,” said Lopez, 40, who is a member of the board of directors of Arise. Employers also often require doctor’s receipts, and a visit to a doctor can be expensive, she said.
The task force also examined the challenges around scheduling, but did not present a policy proposal. Hourly workers without ample notice of their schedules, or who are subject to last-minute shift changes, can have a hard time arranging child care, going to school, taking a second job or budgeting costs when it’s not clear how big their paycheck will be.
While there was general agreement that “efforts should be made to better understand and reduce unwanted and harmful levels of hour unpredictability for employees,” while not limiting flexibility, the task force called for further examination “given the high levels of complexity with the issue.”
Finally, the task force recommended the city seek funding to study and pilot shared security accounts, which are portable benefits programs that are tied to workers rather than employers. Given the growth in the use of independent contractors and freelance and temporary workers, fewer people have access to standard employer-provided benefits.
With shared security accounts, an amount of money is automatically deducted from payroll and put into an account that funds vacation time, retirement, health care coverage or other benefits.
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