President Obama made a huge announcement yesterday: federal contractors must provide their workers with up to seven days of paid leave every year, starting in 2017. This means that 300,000 workers will better be able to care for themselves or their families – making our communities healthier, keeping people out of doctors’ offices and hospitals, and being more productive at work because of faster recovery time, worker satisfaction, and employee retention.
But 300,000 workers is actually just a drop in the bucket – a really huge bucket. 40% of the private sector’s workers don’t get any paid time off at all. That’s 40 million workers. Not a single day off. If they need to skip work for a day, they don’t get paid, and, even worse, risk losing their jobs.
Universal paid leave should be part of any modern economy. Just like with providing fair wages, we sure can afford it. It needs to be built into the cost of doing business because no one should have to choose between putting food on the table and staying home to take care of their sick child. That’s an impossible choice to make.
But here in New York, Governor Cuomo and the state legislature have the opportunity to give a serious boost to the quality of life for working families in New York by ensuring paid family leave for all employees.
As we get closer to next year’s legislative session, we’re going to be working on another big push to win a major expansion of paid family leave. New York can be a leader on this issue and prove to national leaders that this model can work.
Our push for paid family leave goes beyond sick days. By expanding the state’s temporary disability insurance program (which means that the paid leave would be funded by very small employee payroll deductions, thus, no cost to businesses), workers could get up to 12 weeks of paid time off per year – critically important time to take care of a sick parent or to bond with a new baby.
The President’s executive order is a sure sign that policies like paid leave are the new normal – the way things should be. It’s another mark that policies putting people before profits, putting the health of families before the financial health of corporations are key to the society that we all want.
And the comments of our opponents are very telling. The National Federation of Independent Business, which claims to represent the interests of small businesses, said: “For workers whose employers can’t absorb the cost, it’s an arbitrary expense that will ultimately result in shorter hours, lower pay or disappearing jobs.”
I think most would agree that if you can’t provide fair compensation and a decent quality of life for your workers, then your business model isn’t good enough. A winning lobbying strategy shouldn’t be based on threats. If businesses can’t give their employees a living wage and some paid leave, then they shouldn’t be in business. Bad jobs hurt our economy. We shouldn’t tolerate lousy employers. It’s as simple as that.