San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Sick leave proposal is causing headaches
Businesses fretting about potential cost
An Obama-era rule requiring businesses with federal contracts to give employees paid sick leave took effect last year. San Antonio businessman Patrick Garcia said he noticed the effect immediately.
A lot more workers at Division Laundry & Cleaners, a commercial laundry near Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, began calling in sick.
“My senior managers of 37 years and 30 years, they came to me and they said, ‘You know, since this sick leave went into effect we have a lot of sick people in the plant,’ ” Garcia, president of the company, told the City Council last week. “Attendance is the worst in the history of our company.”
From Jan. 1 to July 31, Division Laundry paid workers $155,000 for days they didn’t work, he said.
Garcia is on one side of a battle over whether private employers in San Antonio should be required to provide paid sick leave.
On the other side are people like Vanessa Ruiz, who say they have to choose between working sick and sacrificing wages.
Ruiz told council members that two weeks after giving birth to twins, she was back at work. She said she had no alternative: Her employer didn’t offer paid sick leave.
“Despite knowing that my daughters needed more of my time, despite still dealing with and coping with my physical pains, my postpartum pains, I went back to work,” Ruiz said.
Advocates’ successful signature-gathering campaign means the City Council soon must decide whether to pass a sick leave ordinance or put the matter before voters. The fight ultimately could be decided in the state Capitol, where conservative lawmakers have vowed to enact legislation to bar local governments from requiring paid sick leave.
City Clerk Leticia Vacek told the council Thursday that Working Texans for Paid Sick Time, a coalition of labor and community groups, had gathered more than the 70,000 valid signa-
tures needed to move the proposal forward.
By law, council members now either must enact a sick leave ordinance or put the proposal on the Nov. 6 ballot. They have until Aug. 16 to decide. That’s the council’s last scheduled meeting before Aug. 20, the legal deadline to put initiatives on the fall ballot.
If the proposal becomes law, private employers with 15 or fewer employees would have to provide six days of paid time off a year, larger businesses eight. Workers would be able to use the days for their own or a family member’s physical or mental illness, preventive care, to take legal action, move, or to obtain victim services related to domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking.
Many business leaders — even those who already offer sick leave — say not everyone can afford it and that city government shouldn’t tell them how to compensate their employees.
“The key is that market conditions ultimately should decide whether these things should be added,” David Fry, director of administration for Cox Manufacturing, a maker of precision machine parts on the Northeast Side, told the council.
Most larger employers already offer paid sick leave. It’s business owners with only a few employees who are most likely to be affected.
Also likely to feel the pinch are temporary staffing agencies, food service companies and businesses that employ high school or college-aged employees because they have tight profit margins. They feel caught in-between.
“This mandate is a gamechanger for our business,” said a longtime business owner who didn’t want to be identified because she fears she would be targeted in social media and protests for opposing the measure.
She said mandatory paid sick leave would force her to cut benefits she already offered — medical, dental, vision, life insurance, long-term disability, 401(k), profit sharing and entry level pay that is 125 percent above minimum wage.
“It’s like asking my young children to help with a family budget when they don’t know the family’s household income,” she said. “Is PSL really more important than health care or employees saving for the future?”
Rey Chavez, president of the San Antonio Manufacturers Association, said aerospace companies with multiyear Defense Department contracts could be put in a bind should a city policy differ from what they now have on the books.
“They can’t go back and renegotiate those contracts, they’re set,” Chavez told the council. “I think it’s important for you to realize that.”
According to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, an estimated 354,000 San Antonio workers, or 39 percent of the workforce, lack paid sick days. Michelle Tremillo, executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, one of the groups promoting the proposal, said a community survey showed lack of paid sick leave was a top concern of local residents.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a basic right,” she said.
Shaun Kennedy, a banking executive who is chairman of the board of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, said members were almost universally against a paid sick leave mandate.
“The competitive forces that are in play really drive what kind of benefits are being offered to employees and it’s not based on whether or not a municipality mandates an employee benefits program,” he said. “I just think that’s a slippery slope.”
Conservative groups say private businesses are at the mercy of unions wielding a new sword. Faced with declining membership, unions are increasingly using local legislation or public referendums to secure benefits they once negotiated through collective bargaining.
It has so far been a largely “blue state” phenomenon — starting with minimum-wage ordinances in Washington,
San Francisco and Santa Fe, N.M. There now are minimum-wage ordinances in at least 40 counties and cities and paid sick leave mandates in 43 jurisdictions, including a number of East Coast and
West Coast states.
“What labor groups realized … is that you can go city by city in places like California,” said Michael Saltsman, managing director of the Washington-based Employment Policies Institute. “You’re dealing with council members who are not asking about the wisdom of a new mandate. They just sort of want to know how high and how fast.”
National politics also are at play. Unions also see minimum wage or paid sick leave proposals as a way to get leftleaning voters to the polls, in this case during a crucial midterm election.
The Texas Organizing Project in 2017 took in $135,000 from three major labor organizations: the Service Employees International Union, the Communications Workers of America, and the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees.
Tremillo has said that one of the goals of the signature campaign was to increase the number of people voting in
San Antonio and across the state.
Only 32 percent of registered Bexar County voters turned out for the November 2014 midterms, compared with 57 percent for the presidential election in 2016.
A problem for the City Council is that the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association already has three charter amendments on the ballot that Mayor Ron Nirenberg and most of the council don’t want passed.
The proposals would crimp the power of city government by drastically reducing the number of signatures required for referendums, putting pay and term limits on city managers and giving firefighters unilateral power to take stalled collective-bargaining talks to binding arbitration.
The fear is voters will approve those along with the paid sick time. The council could put off the proposal until the May 2019 ballot, but Nirenberg has said he’s reluctant to delay a decision.
As for a counterattack by business-funded lobbies, they say they’re just getting started.
“It’s going to our board in August,” said Richard Perez, CEO of the San Antonio chamber. “But I’m certain that I’m standing on firm ground in that we don’t like the municipal government telling us what to do. … We would love and are indeed going to be working toward a statewide legislation preempting municipalities from doing such things.”
Both Perez and Cristina Aldrete, CEO of the North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, said their groups have been waiting to see what the City Council does before deciding on an action plan.
They thought they had a reprieve from the sick leave initiative when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a July 9 letter warned Nirenberg and the council that state law prohibited it. Paxton said that under the Texas Minimum Wage Act, the city can’t force private employers to pay for hours not worked.
San Antonio City Attorney Andrew Segovia, however, said Paxton’s letter was not binding on the council.
The attorney general’s office has petitioned to join a lawsuit against the city of Austin’s paid sick leave ordinance, which is set to take effect in October.
State Sen. Donna Campbell, a New Braunfels Republican, filed a brief supporting the plaintiffs in June. She tweeted in February that she was “fully prepared to pass statewide legislation to stop Austin’s intrusion into the private sector.”
State Rep. Paul Workman, R-Austin, has said he will file legislation to reverse Austin’s ordinance “on the first day possible” for the 2019 legislative session.
Gov. Greg Abbott has criticized paid sick leave as a “crushing” and “heavy-handed” mandate.
“Texas is being Californiaized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott said at a meeting of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in the state capital. “We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.” The state has fought local treecutting ordinances and municipal bans on fracking and plastic grocery bags, too.
Aldrete, of the North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, said business owners are concerned about a mixed bag of city-by-city labor laws.
“What ends up happening then is you will have Austin has one program, one set of rules, San Antonio has another set of rules,” she said. “From a big picture looking in, it just creates chaos.”
She added that no one seems to know how the proposed San Antonio requirement would be enforced.
“Are they going to have to hire somebody to go and check our businesses?” Aldrete asked. “All of those questions you start asking, and they don’t have an answer.”