Guv Signs Paid Sick Days Expansion

The bill doesn’t single out female workers as such.

But everyone who took the microphone to speak at a packed, celebratory press conference heralding the expansion of the state’s paid sick days program made clear on Tuesday that this law — freshly signed by the governor — is meant to make Connecticut a more family-friendly place, by helping women stay in the workforce.

Dozens of local and state Democratic politicians and progressive policy advocates crowded into the third floor offices of The Narrative Project, an anti-racist public relations firm located at 142 Temple St., to witness Gov. Ned Lamont sign House Bill No. 5005.

That’s the state law that was approved by both chambers of the state legislature this year that builds off of Connecticut’s first-in-the-nation mandatory paid sick leave legislation from 2011.

While that decade-old law required some Connecticut employers with at least 50 employees to provide up to 40 hours of paid sick leave per year for ​“service workers,” this newly passed expansion – which was signed by Lamont on Tuesday — broadens the scope of covered employees and will require nearly all employers to participate by 2027 (with a three-year phase in, based on employer size, starting in 2025).

This paid sick leave program allows part-time and full-time workers alike to benefit, as employees accrue paid time off based on the total hours they work — namely, one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, up to 40 hours of paid time off per year. The benefit kicks in only after a worker’s 120th day of employment. It also prohibits employers from requiring employees to provide documentation proving that they’re taking paid leave for a valid reason under this law. 

The paid sick leave expansion also allows eligible employees to take time off to care for more than just their own physical health; valid reasons for getting paid to stay home from work include care for an employee’s or an employee’s family member’s mental health, as well as for a business or school closure due to a public health emergency.

Click here to read a summary of the bill as described in a Tuesday press release put out by the governor’s office.

“We are so fortunate to live in a state that takes women’s rights seriously,” said Janée Woods Weber, the executive director of the statewide advocacy organization She Leads Justice, one of the lead backers of the paid sick day expansion law along with CT Working Families Power. ​“No longer will we have to make the choice between taking time to care for our loved ones and a paycheck.”

State Sen. Julie Kushner, one of the co-chairs of the state legislature’s labor committee and another key proponent of the bill, noted just how many loopholes were built into the initial 2011 law. That law excluded, for example, domestic workers and personal care assistants — jobs disproportionately filled by women. 

She also described how the state’s landmark 2019 paid family and medical leave law was designed to benefit workers suffering from serious illnesses and expected to be out of work for relatively long periods of time — and left out many workers who just needed to take a day or two or three to care for themselves or a loved one.

This expansion, she said, helps ​“level the playing field” and fill those gaps.

“We are no longer penalizing women” for taking necessary time off to care for themselves, their families, their communities, said Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz. Since the state passed the country’s first paid sick leave program in 2011, she said, ​“Connecticut has fallen behind.”

“With more women needed across the workforce,” she continued, ​“it’s very important that our state enact policies that are female- and family-friendly.” And this bill is just that.

Lamont lamented that this bill ​“was not very bipartisan” — recognizing how Democrats prioritized and passed this law, and Republicans lined up to oppose it, mostly on the grounds that it will impose too many costs on businesses looking to grow and hire in Connecticut.

He and New Haven State Sen. and President Pro Tem Martin Looney said that the arguments that Republicans have made about the supposedly business-unfriendly nature of such legislation are similar to those made against bills that increased the minimum wage and enacted the paid family leave program. Looney reached back a century to opposition to child labor laws as being in that same vein.

Lamont said that, despite those concerns around the minimum wage and paid family leave laws, Connecticut is booming with startups. Looney decried opposition to the bill, just like opposition to child labor protection laws, as ​“a fraud and a lie then” and a fraud and a lie now.

Kushner said that an ​“overwhelming majority” of Connecticut employers — more than 80 percent, she estimated — already voluntarily offer the same benefit mandated by this law. This new mandate will not impose any additional requirements on those already in compliance. Instead, it will make employers that do not currently offer at least five days of paid time off provide such a benefit to eligible employees.