One of the key pieces of President Obama’s agenda to help American families is to ensure all workers have seven days of paid sick leave. But the proposal, if adopted, may not help that many struggling workers.
There is reason to believe that the number of workers lacking paid sick leave is not as large as the White House says. Data from the government’s own Bureau Labor Statistics contradicts the figure.
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| ‘I used to temp way back in the day and I didn’t think I was going to get any paid sick leave.’ |
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In his State of the Union address, President Obama said, “43 million workers have no paid sick leave — 43 million. Think about that.”
The president endorsed Democratic legislation that would require businesses that employ more that 15 people to provide one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours the employee works.
The White House argues the policy would increase worker productivity by reducing illnesses in the workplace. The administration is encouraging states and cities to pass similar laws.
Elise Gould, senior economist for the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute, argues it won’t even be very expensive.
“It is very low cost. We are not talking about a lot of hours or a lot of days. Most workers who have sick leave don’t even take very much of it. They take maybe half of it,” Gould said.
Workers who are not receiving paid sick leave are among the lowest earners. Only 36 percent of the bottom quarter of private-sector workers — people with a median annual salary of $23,000 or less — do not receive paid sick days, EPI reports.
That percentage drops rapidly as workers earn more. Nearly two-thirds of those with a median annual salary of $35,000 and three-fourths of those with a median annual salary of $55,000 receive paid sick days.
In short, the people who are most likely to be not receiving paid sick days are the same people who aren’t getting much of anything else from their job.
“These low-income workers are the ones who can least afford to lose pay when they are sick,” Gould said.
But adding another mandate simply will make it more likely that employers will cut back in other areas or won’t offer the jobs at all, free-market economists say.
“The employees themselves would lose salary, or the businesses would have to get along with fewer employees,” said Aloysius Hogan, labor policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “The only other possible choice is that businesses would have to make less money, and a lot of small businesses are on the margin now.”
Whether 43 million workers lack paid sick days is not clear. The White House has made the same claim previously but has not provided a source for the figure. A spokesman did not respond to an inquiry.
A spokesman for the Bureau of Labor Statistics could not confirm it. “We don’t track that figure,” a spokesman said. A spokeswoman for the Census Bureau could not confirm it, either.
So where does it come from? An administration source told the Washington Post that the figure was extrapolated from data found in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual survey of worker compensation released in March.
The BLS report, called the “National Compensation Survey,” covered 109 million private-sector workers and reported that 61 percent of them had paid sick leave. The White House did the math, which shows that the 39 percent presumably without paid sick leave equaled 43 million people.
But there are a couple of problems with the figure. The private-sector workforce was not 109 million at the time of the survey. That was the number of people represented in the survey.
The total private-sector workforce, according to the BLS’s monthly unemployment survey, was actually 114 million last March. It’s 118 million now. So that would put the total without paid sick leave at between 45-46 million.
So did the president underestimate the problem? Maybe, but other flaws suggest the number is much lower.
The same chart that the White House drew the 61 percent figure from also reported that 38 percent of all workers had paid personal leave, which for many workers would substitute as paid sick days. Another 12 percent of all workers also had paid family leave.
Presumably there is overlap and double-counting going on between those figures. Some workers presumably have both paid sick leave and paid personal leave, while some have one but not the other and the rest neither. But the BLS data doesn’t sort that out.
It also is not clear how many of the 61 percent are people who are eligible for paid sick leave through their jobs but haven’t worked long enough to qualify for it.
“Part-time minimum wage workers might not qualify,” the CEI’s Hogan said. “I used to temp way back in the day and I didn’t think I was going to get any paid sick leave.”
Other data in the National Compensation Survey contradict the White House’s 43 million claim. The BLS study reported that only 20 percent of all full-time workers, about 28 million people in the public and private sector, received less than five days of paid sick leave a year.
The number for all workers, including part-timers, who had less than five days was 21 percent. The BLS survey didn’t have a figure for how many had no days.
Other studies also cast doubt upon the 43 million figure. A report last year by the Society for Human Resource Management trade association found that 91 percent of businesses offer some form of paid sick leave to employees.
