Paid Leave Mandates May Fail to Reach Part-Time Workers

Paid sick leave supports individual and public health through eliminating the financial penalty for missing work when an employee or an employee’s family member is ill or needs medical care. In America, access to paid sick leave mirrors other economic inequalities, as part-time and low-wage workers are far less likely to have paid leave than full-time or higher-income workers.¹

In the absence of a federal policy, local mandates passed by cities, counties, and states expand the right to paid leave to workers who would not otherwise have it.² Colla et al. report on a vanguard effort in their analysis of how employers implemented the 2007 San Francisco Paid Sick Leave Ordinance in California.³ More San Francisco employers offered leave and covered more employees after the Ordinance went into effect, findings echoed by the more recent evaluation of the Seattle Paid Sick and Safe Time Ordinance in Washington.^3,4 In both Seattle and San Francisco, more than 90% of firms offered paid sick leave to at least some employees after the respective mandates took place.^3,4

However these high rates of leave offering mask within-employer inequalities whereby some employees at an establishment may have access to leave but others do not. The Colla et al. analysis rests on a survey question asking whether an employer provides paid vacation or sick time to any of its employees; a follow-up question asks about the percentage of workers covered.⁵ Relying on responses to the former will overestimate the availability of leave to all employees. Indeed Colla et al. found that the largest employers report covering only 86% of their employees; and the smallest employers cover fewer than 8 in 10.³ The Seattle Ordinance evaluation, which tracked leave offering separately for full- and part-time employees, found that almost all employers (96%) offer leave to their full-time employees. Not all employers have part-time employees, but among those who do, only 62% cover their part-timers.⁴ Neither study tracked leave by earnings level, but the audit-based National Compensation Survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 30% of private industry employees in the bottom quarter of the wage distribution have access to paid sick leave¹; many of these employees presumably work in enterprises where higher-earners do have this benefit.

As other localities implement and examine paid sick leave mandates, detailed tracking of which classes of employees gain access can more accurately track the likely health impact of these measures.