California’s Paid Sick Leave Act
California recently became only the second state to guarantee some annual paid sick leave for most full and part-time employees. Connecticut is the only other state to do so, having passed similar legislation in 2012, though it has modified the original law somewhat since then. With substantial bipartisan support in the Assembly and Senate, Governor Jerry Brown has announced he plans to sign the bill, called the “Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Families Act,” placing California in line with 10 other states that require employers to provide paid sick leave.
The bill would go into effect on July 1, 2015. It requires public and private employers to provide employees who work at least 30 or more days within one year of their hire date with sick leave “at the rate of not less than one hour per every 30 hours worked.” Salaried exempt workers are automatically deemed to work 40 hours per week. There are exemptions, however, for those employees with particular collective bargaining agreements, some construction workers, home healthcare workers and certain airline employees who are covered under the federal Railway Labor Act.
Other provisions of the bill include:
Employers are to carry over unused sick leave from year to year.
That paid sick leave may be limited to 24 hours or 3 days per year.
There is no obligation by employers to allow accruals to exceed 48 hours or 6 days.
Employers to provide written notice to employees of their paid sick leave rights on their itemized wage statement or in a separate notice on each pay period.
If an employer already has an existing paid sick leave policy with the same benefits as the bill, then it is not required to add this bill to it. There are some questions, however, over how some provisions are to be interpreted. For instance, what constitutes a day of work--8 hours or something else? Also, it is unclear by what is meant by “30 or more days?”
There are other provisions in the bill that may lead to confusion over its intent. For example:
An employer voluntarily provides 12 paid time off (PTO) days per year at the start of the calendar year. If the employee uses all 12 PTO days, does the employer have to ask if the PTO days were one of the sick leave reasons specified in Section 246.5 of the bill?
What if the employee used some of the PTO for vacation time? Must the employer then be required to provide 3 carryover days?
Other states often look to California as a model for innovations or changes in social and other legislative acts and adopt similar policies in many cases. State agencies need to review these provisions and to offer California employers clarification. While the bill appears simpler than the Connecticut law in some respects, let us hope that California’s employers not wait 3 years as they did in Connecticut for these agencies to act.