Paid leave advocates promise to keep up fight
Supporters: Misinformation contributed to bill’s defeat in narrow House vote
Sheyenne Lacy, an entrepreneur based in Santa Fe, says she would have loved to see the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act make it to the governor’s desk this past legislative session.
Lacy, 27, runs two businesses — a fashion design company called LAND + OBJECT and the digital strategy firm HODZA Management — in which she employs contract workers.
If paid family and medical leave had passed, she said, it would have helped her attract and retain talent for her growing businesses. It would also let Lacy bring on fulltime workers and easily factor in the expenses associated with such a program.
“The climate in New Mexico — in terms of finding talent, attracting talent, you really have to compete with the labs pretty much,” Lacy said. “And unless I’m offering some kind of really competitive package for high-quality talent, then I just can’t do it.”
The legislation, Senate Bill 3, passed the Senate but failed in the House on a 37-35 vote, with 11 Democrats joining the Republicans to oppose it. After years of efforts to bring such a program to the state — and nearly making it across the finish line during the 30-day session — yet another failure has left supporters of the bill reflecting on why it did not make it to the governor’s desk. It has also inspired them to keep fighting by trying to convince businesses of the benefits of such a program and bringing legislation forward in next year’s 60-day session.
Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, who sponsored the bill in that chamber, told
The New Mexican last week that other states that have implemented paid leave programs — one that would allow employees to take extended time off due to medical issues, the birth of a child or to care for an ill loved one — did so with bipartisan support. But she said this year’s session proved that Republicans, particularly those in the House, “made it their mission to kill this bill.”
“It’s very frustrating to have a party that seemingly doesn’t want to take care of families, and women having babies and caretakers for severe medical issues. It’s just beyond the pale,” she said. “The two chambers — [the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce and New Mexico Chamber of Commerce] — were both sort of screaming from the mountaintops that businesses don’t want this. That’s not the case.”
Other advocates of the bill, including the Southwest Women’s Law Center, say some of the failures in getting it through this year may have come from misinformation campaigns.
Tracy McDaniel, the center’s policy advocate, said critics pointed to employers having to pay a person’s wage replacement while they are on leave and said the program would have created a human resources nightmare for companies, particularly small businesses.
But that’s not the case, McDaniel said. She said the failed legislation called for employees to pay about $5 for every $1,000 in wages and employers $4 for every $1,000.
“When a person’s away on leave, they’re receiving funds from the Department of Workforce Solutions — the paid family medical leave fund — and that employer is not paying a dime to that employee during that period, which gives them the salary savings to … [hire] a temp, paying overtime for an employee or what most do in other states is just reinvest that back in other ways,” McDaniel said.
When it comes to human resources, she said, “the Department of Workforce Solutions is responsible for processing all the claims and reviewing the forms and doing all the verifications and all of those things, and the individual employers are not responsible for doing any of that processing.”
Awesta Sarkash, a public policy director for the Small Business Majority’s work in New Mexico, agrees. She says there were plenty of misconceptions about how the program operates and pointed to a survey from the Washington, D.C.-based organization that shows about 85% of the 305 businesses it surveyed were in support of paid family and medical leave.
“There was a strong sentiment and a lot of legislative and business support for this,” she said.
But Rob Black, president and CEO of the New Mexico Chamber of Commerce, disagrees with the idea his organization misrepresented anything. He told The New Mexican there were key policy differences, such as over how the bill should treat Medicaid contractors that are paid on a fixed rate. He said it wasn’t until the legislation reached the House floor, when an amendment was introduced, that advocates for SB 3 acknowledged “that was a real problem.”
“They’ve had years to amend their plan to not impact Medicaid waiver-based companies like early childhood [and] senior centers,” he said. “That is a key piece that their bill would undermine the social safety net industries that provide for the most vulnerable in New Mexico.”
Black, whose organization supported a more limited form of paid family and medical leave proposed in this year’s House Bill 11, added that Small Business Majority’s survey didn’t properly reflect the number of small-business owners who vote Republican. Just over 20% of business owners who responded to the survey either considered themselves strongly Republican or some variation of leaning Republican.
“[They are] totally misrepresenting the population in that research,” he said. “I think you have to be a little cautious about folks throwing around that we’re the ones misrepresenting facts.”
Either way, advocates of SB 3 say they will continue to push forward with legislation for the session in 2025. That includes, in the meantime, continuing to educate business owners on a paid family and medical leave program.
“It traditionally takes about six years to pass a piece of legislation,” said Santa Fe City Councilor Alma Castro, who owns Café Castro, “so I’m prepared to fight for the next few years for this piece of legislation.”