Paid Sick Days gets Inked

On Friday July 1st, while everyone was driving or stuck in traffic, Connecticut officially became the first state in the Union to enact Paid Sick Days legislation. 

Governor Malloy signed it into Law the day after this was posted online:

New Report Quantifies Paid Sick Days’ Value to Working Families
Published on June 30, 2011 by Vicki Shabo, Director of Work and Family Programs, National Partnership for Women and Families

For working families today, paid sick days can mean the difference between staying afloat and being unable to afford basic expenses like food and transportation – and this lifeline comes at minimal or no cost to businesses. This is the theme of a report released yesterday at a briefing co-hosted by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the National Partnership.   [...]

EPI’s new report, authored by Gould, paints a stark picture of what it means when a working parent’s job offers no paid sick days. In the best case, the worker takes time off without pay. For the average family without paid sick days, if one parent misses three-and-a-half days of work in a month, it loses the equivalent of the family’s entire grocery budget. Missing five days of work reduces the same family’s income to 84 percent of the amount needed to get by.

Even worse, taking an unsanctioned sick day means job loss. At a time when nearly half of all unemployed Americans have been looking for new work for six months or more, this is a cost that struggling families can’t afford to bear.     [...]

An EPI report released in March [...] showed that Connecticut businesses – many of which, beginning in January 2012, will be required to provide paid sick time to certain workers under America’s first statewide paid sick days law – will bear minimal costs as a percentage of sales (fewer than one-half of one percent).

I will be attending a conference next week in Washington DC, as a guest of the Working Families Party, to learn more about how legislation such as ours can be rolled out nationwide.

For now, I am very proud of the solid work done by Jon Green, Lindsay Farrell, and Joe Dinkin of the Connecticut Working Families Party. They were intelligent advocates, great organizers, and able to use humor and street theater to make serious points about the issue.

Thank you all and thank you to our legislators who voted this through the Connecticut House and State Senate.

"ICYMI Thursdays" - Paid Sick Leave

This is the first of what is intended to be a weekly In Case You Missed It post or story or other bit of information.

One of the important issues being debated by the Connecticut Legislature is Paid Sick Days which is also being discussed on the Federal level in Congress as the Healthy Families Act, introduced by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of the 3rd CD.  You can research the discussion through the links provided or by using the search feature at CT News Junkie.

What caught my eye this week was contained in a newsletter from the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). The newsletter included a reprint of Executive Director Teresa Younger's Mother's Day Letter to the Editor from last week.  It was printed in the Hartford Courant.

Giving Mothers What They Really Deserve

Printed on 5/9/2011

We agree with The Courant’s Mother’s Day editorial that “to give mothers the recognition they deserve really calls for something big and dramatic.” But instead of a place on Mount Rushmore, cards and flowers, as The Courant suggests, we would like to suggest this big, dramatic and sensible “gift”: paid sick leave legislation.

One cannot help but notice the cynical juxtaposition of the two editorials: praise mothers for taking care of “skinned knees” in the one, while in the other, denying them the time off to do just that. It’s hard to take care of those knees — and the larger ills they represent — when one is worried about losing pay and possibly even a livelihood. Study after study has shown that paid sick leave is good for business, and it honors mothers — and all workers — 365 days a year, not just one symbolic day in May.

-Teresa Younger, Executive Director
Permanent Commission on the Status of Women