Pinto was at her manufacturing job and her daughter was low on oxygen. She couldn’t leave before finding someone to cover her shift.
“So it's like you're trying to be the good employee,” Pinto said. “You try to have good attendance, so that when you need your hours, they're available for you. But even then, you can't use them when there's something life-threatening for your own kids.”
Nebraska voters passed a paid sick leave bill on Election Day that will guarantee paid sick leave for more employees than ever before who find themselves in situations like Pinto’s. However, the new law also worries business owners in the state.
The initiative passed with about 74 percent of voters supporting the initiative and about 26 percent opposing it.
'Too Sick to Work'
Sick leave can be taken for an employee’s mental or physical illness, a health condition or doctor's visit, a public health emergency or to care for a family member.
Pinto said she wasn’t able to leave work for her daughter’s emergency — which happened years before the campaign to get the issue on the ballot and left her daughter in the hospital for a week — until hours later. When Pinto went back to work, she said she was told that if she was ever a minute late she would lose her job. She left the job as soon as she could after that.
“You don't enjoy going to work when you know your kids' life is not important to them,” Pinto said.
Both full-time and part-time employees will accrue sick leave over the year based on their work week. The new law won’t supersede more generous leave policies offered by some employers.
With the new law's passage, the Nebraska Department of Labor will begin drafting regulations and answers to frequently asked questions to provide guidance for employers and employees, a department spokesperson said. The department will also host a public hearing on the regulations in the first part of 2025.
In Nebraska, about 65 percent of responding businesses offered paid sick leave to some or all of their full-time employees, according to a 2021 benefits report from the Nebraska Department of Labor. For part-time employees it was more than 20 percent of businesses.
With the state labor force sitting at about 1,054,000, according to Labor Department employment data, hundreds of thousands of employees stand to gain paid sick leave.
Low wage workers are less likely to have access to paid sick leave, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Earlier in her career, Jodi Lepaopao, the campaign manager of Paid Sick Leave Nebraska, was a part-time employee without paid sick leave.
Later, Lepaopao said she became a supervisor and was penalized for using paid sick leave.
“I was the manager who had employees come in, clearly too sick to work, and when I would tell them to go home and rest, they would tell me that they couldn't afford to, which is just absolutely gut-wrenching and something I had related to,” Lepaopao said.
The sick leave measure is part of an effort by the Sixteen Thirty Fund and organizations like Nebraska Appleseed, where Lepaopao is part of the team, to support worker wages and benefits. The campaign started its petition to put paid sick leave on the ballot after a similar paid sick leave bill failed in the Nebraska Legislature.
“After that continued failure by lawmakers to recognize and support the needs of workers in Nebraska, we decided after raising the minimum wage in 2022 this was kind of the next step to supporting working families in Nebraska,” Lepaopao said.
'Not That Simple'
Before the paid sick leave initiative, Nebraska voters passed an initiative in 2022 to change the minimum wage every year. Together the two initiatives pose a challenge for some businesses.
Both minimum wage and sick leave mandates affect businesses like grocery stores, said Executive Director of the Nebraska Grocery Industry Association Ansley Fellers.
“We are all aware of the cost at the grocery store and all of these things have an impact on that,” Fellers said.
Minimum wage is the industry’s bigger worry because of the uncertainty of the amount it will increase in future years, Fellers said.
Since 2022, the minimum wage has increased yearly. It's currently $12 and will increase to $13.50 on Jan. 1.
After 2026, when the minimum wage will reach $15, the minimum wage will be adjusted based on the Consumer Price Index for the Midwest Region. The index measures the average change in prices of certain goods and services in an area.
Fellers said some business owners are concerned that the upcoming changes based on the Midwest CPI could be inflationary.
However, the rate at which the Midwest CPI changes has fallen since late 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In September the yearly change was at about 3 percent.
But Fellers said grocery prices are sensitive and business costs might have to be passed to consumers.
“As much as people can, they are trying to absorb the cost of these things, but we're getting to the point now where I think those are going to have to be passed along,” Fellers said.
The association's next steps involve working with the Legislature to clarify the paid sick leave initiative, Fellers said.
Fellers also said that although the initiative does have different requirements for small and large businesses, those definitions are arbitrary and don’t match federal definitions.
The initiative defines small businesses as companies with less than 20 employees. Those businesses have a lower requirement of 40 hours of paid sick leave.
Meanwhile, the federal Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees unpaid medical and family leave for employees of businesses with 50 or more employees, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
The association fought against the minimum wage ballot initiative in 2022 by donating over $30,000 to Prosper Nebraska, which opposed the initiative, according to campaign finance filings. However, it didn’t fund any efforts against the paid sick leave initiative.
Because it was a presidential election year and there was a focus on turning out urban populations, the association decided to focus on going to elected officials to soften the impact for small businesses instead of fighting the initiative, Fellers said.
“The message in favor of these things is, ‘Do you want more money and do you want more time off?’” Fellers said. “And the message against it is sort of like, ‘Well, it's not that simple.’”
(c)2024 Lincoln Journal Star, Neb. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
