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Sick Leave Protection

More than 59 million Americans have no paid sick leave benefits.1
Forty-seven percent of all private-sector employers in the United States do not provide a single day of paid sick leave to their employees. In fact, fewer and fewer companies have paid sick leave programs—the percentage of medium and large companies with paid sick leave plummeted from 70 percent in 1986 to only 56 percent in 1997.2 As a result, millions of Americans go to work while sick because they cannot afford to take unpaid leave.
The denial of sick leave benefits is bad for workers and bad for business.
When sick employees continue to work, they take longer to recover and may spread their illness to co-workers. The effect on employers is equally detrimental. Businesses that rely on sick workers suffer from lower productivity, higher employee turnover, and decreased morale.
Furthermore, 86 million Americans are unable to take paid sick days to care for children.3
The federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) guarantees unpaid leave for family illness or childbirth, but most Americans cannot afford to take advantage of it. Of American workers who qualify for leave under the FMLA, 78 percent say they do not use it because they cannot afford to go without pay.4 The financial hardship for those who do take unpaid leave forces nearly one in ten onto public assistance.5 The guarantee of unpaid leave is meaningless if workers can’t afford to use it.
Sick children and elderly parents suffer when their working relatives cannot take time off to care for them.
In one survey, 41 percent of working parents said they had missed medical appointments or delayed treatments for their children, which places their children’s health at risk.6 Moreover, 25 percent of Americans care for elderly relatives who frequently need assistance when they become sick.7 Americans shouldn’t have to choose between paying the bills and caring for family.
Leave benefits strengthen businesses.
Businesses can improve employee morale and control costs if they provide leave benefits. According to the bipartisan Commission on Family Leave, the vast majority of employers—84 percent—reported that the benefits of providing leave under the FMLA offset or outweighed its costs. In many cases, there were no costs at all: over three-fourths of all businesses surveyed reported no ill effects on productivity or company growth. Moreover, 98 percent of employees who took family leave returned to work for the same employer, and 77 percent of employers reported cost savings because of decreased turnover.8
Almost every state provides paid sick leave to state employees that covers the illnesses of employees and their family members.
Every state provides at least nine paid sick days annually to its employees, and all except Louisiana and Mississippi allow leave time to be used to care for family members.9
Some states also provide limited forms of leave benefits for all workers.
California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island have Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) systems that provide partial wage replacement for employees who are temporarily disabled for medical reasons, including pregnancy and childbirth. California’s TDI program allows workers to collect as much as 55 percent of their wages for up to six weeks while they take time off to care for a new infant or a seriously ill family member, is entirely employee-funded, and costs employees about $27 a year. Minnesota pioneered a public program that provides low-income working parents with subsidies to care for infants under age one. Montana and New Mexico have similar programs.
Seven states guarantee flexible sick leave.
In 2005, Maine enacted a law that requires businesses with 25 or more employees to allow those who have accrued sick and vacation time to use it to care for sick family members. Since 2002, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, Washington and Wisconsin have enacted similar laws. Although these new laws do not provide additional leave to workers, they make legal what many employees have had to do covertly in order to balance their work and family responsibilities.
Americans strongly support paid sick leave.
Eighty-two percent of women and 75 percent of men surveyed in 1998 favored the idea of a new insurance program that would provide families with partial wage replacement when a worker takes family or medical leave.10 In 2002, 79 percent of working women surveyed said that access to paid family and medical leave is more important to them than increased pay, promotions or job flexibility.11

This policy brief relies in large part on information from the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Endnotes
  1. Vicky Lovell, “No Time to Be Sick: Why Everyone Suffers When Workers Don’t Have Paid Sick Leave,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2004.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Department of Labor, “Balancing the Needs of Families and Employers: Family and Medical Leave Surveys,” 2000.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Jody Heymann, “The Widening Gap: Why America’s Working Families Are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done About It,” 2000.
  7. “Balancing the Needs of Families and Employers.”
  8. Ibid.
  9. National Partnership for Women & Families, “Get Well Soon: Americans Can’t Afford to Be Sick,” June 2004.
  10. Lake Snell Perry & Associates, “Family Matters: A National Survey of Women and Men,” conducted for the National Partnership for Women & Families, February 1998.
  11. Lake Snell Perry & Associates, “Ask a Working Woman Survey,” Conducted for AFL-CIO, March 2002.
  12. “Balancing the Needs of Families and Employers.”
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