The Paid Sick Leave law goes into effect Jan. 1, making Connecticut the first and only state to require employers to provide paid sick leave.
Under the law, covered employers are required to provide certain employees with paid sick time that accrues at the rate of one hour of leave per 40 hours worked up to a maximum of 40 hours per calendar year. The law also prohibits retaliation against any employee who requests, or uses, paid sick leave or who files a complaint against the employer.
The law does not apply to every employer or to all employees. Unsurprisingly, compliance is not voluntary. Covered employers who fail to comply with the law may be investigated by the Department of Labor, fined and ordered to pay damages to aggrieved employees. With the Jan. 1 effective date quickly approaching, every employer in the state should take steps to determine: 1) whether it is subject to the law; and 2) if so, what steps to take to comply with the new requirements.
The following guide should help.
1. Is your company a covered employer?
The paid sick leave law applies to employers with 50 or more employees in Connecticut. This is determined by looking at the company’s quarterly earnings report filed with the Department of Labor. If in any quarter during the previous year, your company reported 50 or more employees, it is subject to the law that year. If your company does not meet this requirement, i.e., it has 40 employees in Connecticut and 30 employees in Massachusetts, it is not subject to the law.
2. Are you a manufacturer as defined in the law?
The legislature carved out an exception for manufacturing establishments which the law defines as a business with an NAICS classification in sector 31, 32 or 33. This is not a blanket exemption for manufacturers, however, because it only applies to sites at which manufacturing operations are conducted. This includes a campus-type setting if manufacturing is the primary function on the campus. This means that if your company has 50 or more employees and is a manufacturer with sites in the state at which no manufacturing occurs, those non-manufacturing sites are covered by the law.
3. Do you employ “service workers”?
The law mandates that covered employers provide non-exempt “service workers” with paid sick leave. “Service workers” are employees whose primary duties track those of the 68 federal Standard Occupational Classification System titles listed in the law. If your company has employees who interact with the public — especially in the fields of health care and food service/hospitality, your company likely employs service workers.
4. What if your company is not covered by the law?
If your company is not subject to the law, your company is free to continue to maintain its existing sick leave, PTO or other paid time off policies (subject of course to Family and Medical Leave and other legal requirements).
5. What if your company is covered by the law?
If you determine your company is subject to the law, there are many ways in which you can comply. One is to identify which of your employees are “service workers” and craft a policy applicable only to them which satisfies the law. Another is to implement a new policy that conforms to the law and apply that policy to either your company’s non-exempt employees or to the entire workforce. Either way, your company’s policy must satisfy all the requirements of the law even under the law’s so-called “safe harbor” provision.
6. What does compliance via the “safe harbor” provision mean?
Under the provision, many employers have concluded that their existing paid time off policy is compliant merely because it provides employees with 40 or more hours of paid sick time per year. This is not correct. Your company’s policy must comply with all the law’s requirements. These additional requirements include:
• Imposing no more than a one-hour minimum increment on employees’ usage of time;
• Accruing time at a rate of one hour for every 40 hours worked on a calendar year basis;
• Offering time for all of the reasons identified in the law (illness, treatment or preventive care of the employee, the employee’s child or spouse or where the employee is a victim of family violence or sexual assault);
• Requiring documentation of the need for leave only for absences of three consecutive work days;
• Unless the need for leave is foreseeable, requiring notice only “as soon as practicable” for leave time; and
• Allowing carryover of up to 40 hours each year.
7. Does your company need to do anything other than implement or revise a paid time off policy?
If your company is subject to the law, it is required to provide notice to its service workers of the law. Employers can comply with this requirement by posting a poster (in English and in Spanish) in a conspicuous place in its workplace.
James Shea and Holly Cini are partners at the law firm of Jackson & Lewis in Hartford. For more information, please refer to Jackson Lewis’ Paid Sick Leave Q&A. This guide, which includes the law’s list of service workers as well as English and Spanish versions of the posters, can be found at www.jacksonlewis.com/media/pnc/1/media.1851.pdf
