The Obama administration’s Labor Department finalized a rule Thursday that requires federal contractors to give their employees up to seven paid sick days a year, a rule that will create that benefit for 660,000 workers.
The rule follows an executive order Obama issued last year mandating the leave. In announcing the action, the White House also referred to President Obama’s statements in his 2014 State of the Union address, and said the rule fulfills Obama’s goal in that speech.
“A woman deserves equal pay for equal work. She deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job,” Obama said at the time. “A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or a sick parent without running into hardship — and you know what? A father does too.”
In addition to the new Labor rule, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that starting in March, it will collect new data from employers that will let it improve investigations of possible pay discrimination.
The EEOC is charged with handling employee complaints of discrimination, and the agency will start asking companies to submit pay data by gender, race and ethnicity from companies with more than 100 employees.
Together, the White House said the two steps are aimed at helping working families balance work and home responsibilities. Although both parents work in most families, workplaces have not kept pace, the White House said.
In its statement announcing the sick leave rule, the White House said more and more private sector workers are receiving sick leave, but said many are still being left behind. “When workers get sick they may have to choose between caring for themselves or paying their bills,” the White House said.
To underscore the point, the White House circulated a Q&A interview between Obama and a reporter for Slate magazine.
“The United States is the only industrialized country in the world where employees aren’t guaranteed the right to take a sick day off of work,” Obama told Slate. “As a result, there are some 44 million workers in the private sector without paid leave who are incentivized to show up to their job even if they or their child has the flu.”
When it comes to equal pay, women, as a whole, still make less than male colleagues. But the White House also cited progress here.
In 2008, a “typical woman” working full-time earned only 77 percent for every dollar earned by a “typical man,” the White House said. Since that time, woman pay equity as jumped three cents to 80 cents to every dollar a man earns.
“That means that for a woman working full-time, the pay gap has shrunk by more than 10 percent, or about $1,200 since the Obama took office,” the White House said. “Much work remains.”
The business community has opposed Obama’s executive action on requiring paid sick leave, arguing that while often desirable on the surface, it imposes another burden, particularly to small businesses that many may find too onerous to meet.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses has opposed the executive order from the onset, arguing that the reporting and compliance mandates for the sick leave alone will make it harder for these companies to compete for federal contracts.
“We’re very disappointed that the Department of Labor moved forward with a rule that will make it even harder for small businesses to compete for government contracts,” Dan Bosch, NFIB’s senior manager of regulatory policy told the Washington Examiner. “There was already plenty of red tape they had to wade through just to bid for work. This new requirement will drive up costs and create new compliance headaches.”
“The new rule will cut out competition and drive up costs, it’s the taxpayers who really lose out,” he said.
A U.S. Chamber of Commerce official said the mandate makes it sound as if employers are not providing paid sick leave because they’re greedy or “evil,” which isn’t the case, especially for small business.
“There are franchise operations in a wide array of locations,” Marc D. Freedman, executive director of labor law policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the New York Times. “If someone isn’t providing this benefit, there’s a reason. It isn’t because they’re bad people, evil employers. It’s that you’re imposing a burden on them.”
