Plenty at stake in battle over sick leave law

Marilyn Washington was in an East Side beauty store in April, searching for lipstick, when she slipped on a greasy part of the floor. She crashed to the ground and hit her head.

“I fell so hard, I don’t know how long I was out,” Washington said. When she awoke, her head hurt and she couldn’t see well. The pain spread to her neck and shoulders and down her right arm.

“Has your arm ever hurt you so bad, you cannot sleep?” she asked. “You can’t stand for anybody to touch you? That’s what I went through.”

The next day, Washington, 71, was back at work, cooking noodles for a dialysis patient. The home care provider said she was afraid to miss work after a separate health incident last fall sidelined her for months.

“I cannot afford to get behind,” Washington said. “We are just getting out of the red.”

Like an estimated 354,000 other San Antonians, Washington doesn’t receive paid sick leave from her employer, Pride PHC Services. The earlier absence from work put her in a hole as bills piled up — for electricity, a car loan and property taxes on her home.

When her lights went out, she learned she would have to pay $1,000 to turn them back on, on top of a late payment. She ended up getting help through a residential energy assistance partnership and paid the bills off in six monthly payments.

“It was a hard struggle last year,” Washington said, wiping away tears. “People don’t know. They don’t understand that when you have to pay something and you struggle, it’s hard to get well. … I couldn’t really function like that.”

As the debate around San Antonio’s paid sick leave ordinance continues amid court challenges and possible changes to the

law, the outcome has consequences for hundreds of thousands of people.

The law would require employers with between six and 15 employees to provide a minimum of 48 hours of paid sick leave. For larger businesses, it’s 64 hours. The law applies to all employees in the city who work more than 80 hours in a year; employees get one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked.

After business groups sued to block the ordinance, the city attorney’s office agreed last month to delay its effective date from Aug. 1 to Dec. 1. City lawyers said that would allow time for the two sides to negotiate changes to the ordinance and possibly avoid a court battle.

Washington and others without paid sick leave say they aren’t asking for a lavish perk. They say sick leave should be a standard benefit.

“I don’t want to be rude to the companies, but most of my focus is on the working citizens,” Washington said. “We work hard. They can depend on us to be there.”

While some business owners oppose a sick leave mandate on principle, others — like Pam Goble, CEO of Ability HomeCare — say they’re concerned about the complications the law would introduce into their day-to-day operations.

Ability provides specialty care services to patients 21 and younger. It pays its providers on a pervisit basis, not an hourly wage.

Because San Antonio’s ordinance, in its current form, says employees will accrue sick leave based on hours worked, Ability would have to upgrade its payroll software to track hours for its 240 providers.

The company likely would have to add a full-time employee to oversee the new payroll process, said Marisa Resendez, the company’s chief financial officer.

“Administratively, we’re going to have a lot of added costs,” she said.

The company’s

$125,000 per year.

“It does threaten the business,” Goble said. “We already operate on thin margins, so it’s going to be threatening the future of home health.”

All of Ability’s 650 patients are on Medicaid, and the company collects payment from the state at fixed reimbursement rates.

“Unlike a private sector company, we don’t have the ability to raise our rates,” Goble said.

A study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., found that 39 percent of San Antonio workers lack paid sick leave. They are disproportionately lowincome and Hispanic or black, the study found.

Workers in the service industry are among the least likely to have the benefit.

Business owners have often complained that the ordinance didn’t receive a proper vetting before the City Council approved it last year.

A coalition led by the Texas Organizing

estimate? Project, a progressive political action group, collected more than 144,000 signatures — double the required amount and roughly 9 percent of the city’s population — to place a proposal for paid sick leave on the November ballot. To avoid the referendum, the City Council adopted the policy by ordinance. Council members said doing so gave them latitude to adjust the ordinance in the future, and it avoided muddling an already-complicated midterm election ballot.

Also, city officials expected the Legislature to kill the ordinance — which lawmakers failed to do. As a result, the typical process of review and revision for a new ordinance didn’t begin until April.

Ten other states and the District of Columbia have paid sick leave laws.

San Antonio’s ordinance wouldn’t have required Washington’s employer, Pride PHC Services, to continue paying her wage during her months-long absence. It would have allowed her to collect one more paycheck to offset her bills — and perhaps stave off the $1,000 penalty she incurred on her electric bill.

“It would have meant that I wouldn’t have worried so much about it,” she said. “It might not be a check like you (usually) get, but it’s something to help you out.”

Washington said she isn’t interested in a free ride. She’s worked since the sixth grade and had a long career at Mission Trails Baptist Hospital before going into home care.

“We’re the ones that are out there working for you, so it works both ways,” she said, referring to employers. “You need us, and we need you. They don’t see it that way.”

Esther Tijerina, a home care provider for Rio Grande Valley Universal Provider Service, makes $9 an hour caring for a disabled patient.

She had to cut back her hours after adopting her three grandchildren, who are between 6 and 11 years old. When one of them is sick, she has to miss work.

That puts Tijerina in a financial squeeze.

“What can you do when you don’t have the resources? You’ve got to do without,” she said. “I do without a lot of stuff, but my bills are first. I might do without some clothes, might do without shoes, might do without food.”

She and Washington joined the fight for paid sick leave after Joleen Garcia, an organizer with the Texas Organizing Project, knocked on their doors last fall.

When business groups filed the lawsuit challenging the ordinance, TOP and MOVE Texas, another community organization, intervened in the case to defend the law and argue against a delay.

Washington joined the case as a named party.

At Ability HomeCare, CEO Goble said full-time employees receive at least 14 days of paid time off, a benefit that fulfills the ordinance requirements. She’s now required to provide the benefit to part-time workers as well.

Goble and CFO Resendez said they’re not fundamentally opposed to paid sick leave. They said they could live with it if there were adjustments to alleviate the administrative burden and guard against employee abuse.

“Everybody should have paid sick leave in a perfect world, yes,” Resendez said.

Others aren’t so sure.

Davis Phillips owns and operates the tourist haunts across the street from the Alamo, including Ripley’s Haunted Adventure and Tomb Rider.

“Every time government makes a decision — almost every single time — it makes it harder for small-business people to succeed,” he said. “There’s this perception that everybody in business is a rich millionaire who treats people poorly, and that’s just not true.”

Phillips said he provides a strong benefits package to his 25 full-time employees. He said it includes a week of sick time, with added benefits as workers accrue more tenure.

But his organization swells to 230 people during peak times in the summer with seasonal workers, many of them teens in their first jobs.

He said he tried to estimate the cost of giving all those workers paid sick leave but “didn’t know where to start.”

Phillips said the ordinance’s “one-size-fits-all” approach — the lack of exemptions or distinctions for different types of workers — creates a headache for business.

He said he sympathizes with workers such as Washington but thinks employee benefits should be determined by the free market.

“It’s really outside the scope of what a city government should be involved in,” he said.

The task of balancing these competing interests falls to the city’s Paid Sick Leave Commission — a 13-member group of stakeholders reviewing the ordinance — and to the City Council, which will decide how to change the ordinance.

Lawsuits in several Texas cities, including San Antonio, assert that municipal governments don’t have the authority to dictate employment benefits. That’s the province of the state, they argue.

Ricardo Cedillo, the attorney representing the business groups challenging the law, said he will renew his request for a court order blocking the ordinance Nov. 7 if it hasn’t been modified to his clients’ satisfaction by then.

The activists who argued against the delay believe that the business community won’t agree to any kind of mandatory requirement.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg has vowed to preserve the spirit of the law.

That suggests the issue will almost certainly be decided in court.

If the courts — as many expect — rule that cities don’t have the authority to require paid sick leave, TOP Executive Director Michelle Tremillo said her organization will take the fight to the Legislature.

“Eventually,” she said, “this is going to happen.”