On July 1, 2017, Chicago’s Paid Sick Leave Ordinance and Cook County’s Earned Sick Leave Ordinance go into effect, requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to covered employees. (A detailed description of each ordinance’s requirements may be found on our blog here and here.) In addition to providing paid sick leave, employers must provide notice to employees of their rights under the law.
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Following in the footsteps of the City of Chicago, Cook County, Ill. has now adopted two new ordinances providing for paid sick leave for all employees and an increase to the minimum wage for low income workers. With both ordinances effective July 1, 2017, employers will need to budget accordingly to minimize the financial impact these two new laws may have.
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Two recent laws in Illinois and Chicago provide employees with unpaid leave for the death of a child or paid leave for an illness. On June 22, 2016, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance (“Sick Leave Ordinance”) guaranteeing paid sick leave to private sector and City of Chicago employees. On July 29, Governor Bruce Rauner signed the Child Bereavement Leave Act (“CBLA”) into law, which provides unpaid leave to employees who lose a child. The CBLA became effective at the time of its signing, and the Sick Leave Ordinance becomes effective on July 1, 2017.
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Effective July 1, 2015, California will join Connecticut and Massachusetts[1] in providing mandatory paid sick leave for employees who work in the state at least 30 days within a year, and who are employed for at least 90 days. Under the new law, employees will accrue at least 1 hour of paid leave for every 30 hours worked, for approximately 8 days a year for full-time employees. However, the new law allows an employer to limit the amount of paid sick leave its employees may take in one year to 24 hours (3 days). Employees must be allowed to carry over unused sick leave from one year to the next, but an employer can cap the amount of sick leave an employee may accrue at 48 hours (6 days). This law applies to all California employees regardless of whether they are part-time or temporary employees, with limited exceptions. Even small employers are subject to the new rules.
AB 1522 requires employees be allowed to take paid sick leave for either their own health condition or the health condition of a family member, including preventative treatment. Family members include the employee’s parent, child, spouse, registered domestic partner, grandparent, grandchild, and sibling. Employers are not required to increase the number of paid leave days allowed for in existing policies if they provide for equal benefits as the new law.
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To help employers prepare for the new year, this Alert addresses certain legislative developments in 2015 that are likely to affect employers this year under federal law as well as in Illinois, California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Washington D.C., Georgia, Michigan and Texas.
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On September 10, 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law AB 1522, known as the “Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Families Act of 2014.” This bill requires California employers, large and small, to provide paid sick leave for their employees. California and Connecticut are the only states in the country thus far to mandate paid sick leave. The law goes into effect on July 1, 2015.
Coverage: Unlike certain other employment laws that are limited to larger employers, there is no minimum number of employees required to trigger coverage under AB 1522. The law broadly extends paid sick leave to most employees, with limited exceptions for certain employees covered by collective bargaining agreements, to providers of in-home supportive services, and to certain employees of air carriers. The exclusion for employees covered by collective bargaining agreements applies if the agreement expressly provides for the wages, hours of work, and working conditions of employees, and expressly provides for 1) paid sick days or a paid leave or paid time off policy that permits the use of sick days for those employees; 2) final and binding arbitration of disputes concerning the application of its paid sick days provisions; 3) premium wage rates for all overtime hours worked; and 4) regular hourly rate of pay of not less than 30% more than the state minimum wage rate. A separate exclusion also applies to employees in the construction industry covered by a collective bargaining agreement if the agreement includes specified provisions and was entered into before January 1, 2015 or expressly waives the requirements of AB 1522.
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This Alert highlights certain federal law developments as well as those occurring in Illinois, California, New York and Georgia that will affect employers in 2014. No significant employment-related statutory developments are to take effect in 2014 in Michigan or Washington, DC.
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