Good news for at least one local baseball sportscaster: the City Council will unveil a revised bill on paid sick leave policy for private employers tomorrow. The proposal would require business with 20 or more workers to provide nine paid sick days for employees. Businesses with 19 or fewer employees would be categorized as "small businesses," and be required to provide five paid sick days. According to Dan Levitan of the Working Family Parties, 88% of the city's estimated 214,070 businesses (189,006), would fall under the five-day requirement.
According to some surveys, some 1.3 million NYC workers currently don't get any paid sick leave; the Daily News estimates the cost of the mandated sick leave ranges from $413 a year per worker to as much as $1,560 a year. The bill was first proposed earlier this year with the maximum-allowed nine days sick leave for any businesses with 10 or more employees, but was scaled back after mounting criticism. Republican Councilman Daniel Halloran still doesn't like the revised bill though: "Half bad still makes it bad. The government is still going to dictate to businesses how to operate."
Larry Littlefield of Room8, who worked in city government for over 20 years, questions how businesses will afford these paid sick days, and whether they will cut into vacation time: "In reality, I would get 15 days off rather than 20 and five unused sick days, unless I were willing to start lying. Why doesn't the City Council understand this? Perhaps because their experience is in government, where lots of sick days are granted and lying about being sick is common. Most city workers don't start at 20 vacation days and 12 sick days. They start at 32 'vacation days,' if they either don't get sick or come to work sick, which many do to save their 'sick days' for the beach."
A public hearing to discuss the bill, hosted by the Center for NYC Affairs, is scheduled for Wednesday. Yet to be seen is how this bill will affect people who call in sick from other states.
