A board that will oversee the roll-out and administration of Connecticut’s newly created paid family medical leave program has officially begun its work.
The Paid Family Medical Leave Insurance Authority met for the first time Friday morning to swear in board members, review the potential hiring of a chief executive officer and discuss outreach to employers and other stakeholders, according to the meeting agenda.
State lawmakers created the 15-member board in the paid leave law passed in the recent legislative session.
Gov. Ned Lamont named Joshua Geballe, commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services, to chair the board.
While federal law provides some guarantees that employees won’t lose their jobs when they take medical leave, those guarantees don’t require employers to continue to pay the worker during their absence. Connecticut was the seventh state to beef up those protections by requiring private employers to provide some level of compensation for the birth of a child, caring for a sick loved one and other situations.
Connecticut’s program is believed to offer the richest benefits of any state — a maximum weekly benefit of $780, which will rise to $900 when the state minimum wage hits $15 an hour five years from now, according to the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA).
Lawmakers gave the board the authority to reduce benefit levels if it determines premiums aren’t sufficient to cover them.
The authority will set the actual level of employee premium contributions, but the law caps it at 0.5 percent of a worker’s earnings.
Connecticut’s program requires no direct financial contribution from employers, which is different than in Massachusetts.
Still, the program has been controversial here. CBIA members said they were concerned about difficulties replacing certain employees for up to six months when they take family or medical leave.
Paid leave was one of Gov. Ned Lamont’s campaign promises, and back in March at the CBIA’s annual Connecticut Business Day at the Capitol, he defended it as well as the minimum wage hike that just began to phase in this week, saying the worker-friendly policies are needed to bring Connecticut’s workplace into the 21st century.
“This marks the first step in the process toward providing the hard-working people of our state with the ability to maintain a job while handling the difficulties of life that every single person inevitably has to deal with at one time or another,” Lamont said in a statement Friday. “This program will not only benefit workers, but it will provide small businesses who cannot afford robust medical leave policies of their own with the ability to do right by their workforce. By joining the growing list of states that are establishing insurance programs such as this, we are making Connecticut an even stronger place to live, work, and do business.”
Virtually all Connecticut employers will be required to manage payroll withholdings, which will begin in Jan. 2021. Workers can begin to collect benefits from the program one year after that, according to the law.
