Healthy Families Act HFA Â» Family Medical Leave Act FMLA Â» Paid Sick Leave

Healthy Families Act: Sounds Like a Bad Idea to Me

Posted on 11-May-07 by The Timekeeper

James Sherk at The Heritage Foundation has written a thought-provoking article about the proposed Healthy Families Act (HFA) sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass): Mandatory Paid Sick Leave Invites Misuse That Harms Co-Workers and Customers.

This Act, if it becomes law, would require all businesses employing 15 people or more to provide their employees with at least seven days of paid sick leave per year. Employees would be able to take this leave on an hour-by-hour basis and employers would be prohibited from requiring a doctor’s certification for absences of less than three days.

While requiring a doctor’s certification would be permitted for an absence of more than three days, employers would apparently not be allowed to challenge the validity of the certification.

Mr Sherk points out — rightly, in my opinion — that such a plan leaves open several avenues of abuse. Employees can use this “sick leave” to excuse late arrival at or early departure from work, take unauthorized vacation time and otherwise skip work at will.

As Mr. Sherk notes, this causes problems for employers, co-workers and customers. Employers’ hands are tied to discipline shirking employees, co-workers are forced to take up the slack and customer service takes a beating.

His alarm is not unfounded. He cites cases already happening under the similar Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). For instance, schoolchildren have been stranded by the side of the road because their bus driver simply decided at the last minute to not show up for work that day, and covered it with a FMLA-based excuse. Unfortunately, when that happens, under the FMLA (as would be true under the proposed HFA), employers have no recourse.

Aside from the problems he mentions, I can think of another potential issue, this one from the employees’ standpoint.

As Mr. Sherk notes, approximately 74% of businesses today offer paid sick time to their employees, and over 80% allow employees to take vacation time to cover time off to care for a sick relative. In addition, state-sponsored disability pay and the existing FMLA provide additional possibilities for those facing longer-term or more severe illnesses.

In many cases, the amount of sick leave allowed is more than seven days. At several employers I’ve worked for, we were allowed up to two weeks of sick pay per year. Sometimes we were given unused sick pay in the form of a “bonus” at the end of the year, as an incentive to not use sick pay unnecessarily. (It does make sense to do this. It costs the employer less to simply pay out unused sick pay at the end of the year than it would to pay the sick pay during the year and have to make arrangements to cover for an absent employee.)

Under a plan that only requires a minimum seven days’ sick pay, how many employers would decide to cut back from their current voluntary two weeks to the legally-required minimum? The HFA doesn’t seem to require employers to pay out any unused sick leave, so how many employers would decide to cut out that employee perk?

While this plan would potentially benefit a few workers who are not currently allowed paid time off for illness, it could very well turn into a reduction in benefits for the majority who are already covered voluntarily by their employers. And for those employees who are bent on shirking their work, this is a golden opportunity for further abuses of the system.

In my opinion this is a bad idea all the way around. If the government is concerned about employees who don’t have paid sick leave, provide tax incentives for employers to make the provision of paid sick leave more attractive. But don’t set a required minimum and don’t tie employers’ hands to deal with the inevitable abuses of any mandatory system.