Paid Sick Leave Updates - August 2021

Paid Sick Leave Updates

This year will be another year of many changes for paid sick leave (often usable for more than just medical reasons), especially with the pandemic revealing the need for it. This includes Maine, New York State, and Colorado, which all became effective January 1, 2021. Maine’s new leave is unique in that it is unlike sick leave and more like PTO in that it can be used for any reason. New York City revised its own Earned Sick and Safe Time Act to more closely resemble the state’s version, including giving more hours of sick and safety leave to employees of large employers with 100 or more employees effective January 1, 2021 (increasing from 40 hours to 56 hours). Effective August 1, 2021, Chicago expanded its sick leave law to cover additional events that qualify for paid leave, one of which now includes when an employee must obey a quarantine order due to communicable disease. Effective October 1, 2021, Nevada will expand its law for employees to use accrued sick leave to care for family members. Next year, starting on July 1, 2022, New Mexico’s statewide paid sick leave law will go into effect. In Texas, the sick leave laws in Dallas and San Antonio are still on hold because of legal challenge, and experts predict that they will be defeated like Austin’s sick leave law was defeated.

A second group of jurisdictions are those that passed emergency paid sick leave laws in response to COVID-19 and are intended to be temporary measures that expire upon a specific date or after the national health emergency has ended. This second group is vast and too many to list, but includes (non-exhaustive list): the federal government (i.e., Families First Coronavirus Response Act, or FFCRA, which no longer has a mandatory paid leave component but the voluntary paid leave component is set to expire on September 30, 2021), New York State, New Jersey, District of Columbia, Nevada, Michigan, Seattle, Pittsburgh, California (click here for EP Legal Alert about CA Senate Bill 95) and many California cities and counties. As of this article, California cities and counties still include Los Angeles County & City, Long Beach, Oakland, Marin County, and Sonoma County. Some jurisdictions have enacted separate paid vaccine leave, requiring employers to provide a specified number of hours of paid leave for employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine – this includes, but is not limited to, Los Angeles City, New York State, Cook County (Illinois), and Nevada.