Council’s sick leave option a healthy last-ditch effort

There are a couple of challenges facing the City Council’s decision to include a second item on the already crowded Oct. 3 municipal election ballot — space and success.

A judge has ordered the city to print the entire seven-page Healthy Workforce Ordinance — which would require any business with a physical presence in Albuquerque to provide paid sick time off for full-time, part-time and temporary workers — on the ballot. There are already concerns that printing the ordinance in type small enough to fit on the ballot will render it unreadable to many, so cramming an additional question on the ballot is problematic.

But the City Council voted earlier this month to include a second sick leave question on the ballot to give voters “another option” to the Healthy Workforce Ordinance. It asks voters whether the council should develop an alternative sick leave policy.

It’s the council’s best last chance of defeating the ordinance, which has been the target of a lawsuit by business groups and severely criticized by business owners as a job killer.

Supporters would have you believe these opponents are cruel taskmasters who care more about the bottom line than their employees. But this onerous ordinance goes far beyond providing sick leave to employees; it adds layers of expensive regulation and paperwork for the city and employers, limits employers’ ability to fire or lay off employees and contains a provision that would prevent future councils from changing it.

Councilor Brad Winters’ ballot measure — an advisory question expressing voters’ wishes — shows the council is open to a sick leave ordinance that isn’t burdened by the excess regulations of the Healthy Workforce Ordinance. It gives voters an option to show they support paid sick leave, and likely many do, without the additional baggage of the flawed one already on the ballot — one that, if approved, will certainly wind up in court.