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Home » Overtime & Minimum Wage Law » Paid Sick Leave in the Time of Coronavirus

Paid Sick Leave in the Time of Coronavirus

March 12, 2020 by Lisa Guerin

[March 19, 2020: New law alert! We’ve posted an update to the infor­ma­tion con­tained in this post. For cur­rent infor­ma­tion, please see Paid Sick Leave and Paid Fam­ily Leave Under the Fam­i­lies First Coro­n­avirus Act.]

Many employ­ees who don’t go to work because of the coronavirus—whether they are ill or stay­ing home as directed by a pub­lic official—won’t get paid time off for the days they miss. Some may even lose their jobs. Here’s how the law does and does not pro­tect work­ers in the event of a pub­lic health crisis.

By now, you’ve undoubt­edly heard the list of steps we should all be tak­ing to stop the spread of coro­n­avirus, from wash­ing our hands and not touch­ing our faces to stay­ing home if we aren’t feel­ing well. (If you pre­fer your coro­n­avirus advice with viral dance moves, check out this inter­pre­ta­tion of the Viet­nam government’s PSA on stay­ing healthy.)

For many employ­ees, though, miss­ing work can be costly: About 25% of pri­vate indus­try work­ers in the U.S. get no paid sick time. And the per­cent­ages are higher for some jobs that are likely to involve pub­lic con­tact, like sales and ser­vice positions.

No Fed­eral Pro­tec­tions Exist

No fed­eral law requires employ­ers to offer paid sick leave, so employ­ers in many states are free to decide whether to offer paid sick time as a job ben­e­fit. Although there’s plenty of pres­sure right now to pass a fed­eral law requir­ing paid sick leave, noth­ing has hap­pened yet.

Just this week, Sen­a­tor Patty Mur­ray and Con­gress­woman Rosa DeLauro rein­tro­duced a turbo-​charged ver­sion of the Healthy Fam­i­lies Act, which would have required employ­ers to allow employ­ees to earn up to seven paid sick days a year—and required employ­ers to pro­vide 14 paid sick days imme­di­ately in the event of a pub­lic health emer­gency, includ­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­demic. Law­mak­ers have intro­duced The Healthy Fam­i­lies Act in sev­eral forms for the past 15 years, but Con­gress has failed to take action—and this week was no dif­fer­ent. Sen­a­tor Lamar Alexan­der blocked pas­sage of the bill by unan­i­mous con­sent. House Democ­rats have pro­posed adding paid leave to the coro­n­avirus relief bill requested by Pres­i­dent Trump, but it remains to be seen how their pro­posal will fare.

Some States Require Paid Sick Leave

In the absence of fed­eral action, about a dozen states have laws that require employ­ers to give employ­ees at least a few sick days per year. Typ­i­cally, employ­ees in these states earn sick time as they work. In New Jer­sey, for exam­ple, employ­ees earn an hour of paid sick leave for every thirty hours they work. These laws also allow employ­ers to cap how much sick time an employee may earn or use in a year, and how much time an employee may carry over into the fol­low­ing year.

Employ­ees can use this time for their own health con­cerns or to care for a fam­ily mem­ber who is ill. Although these laws are not very generous—they pro­vide from three to five days off per year, commonly—they give employ­ees a small cush­ion if they need to stay home.

To find out the rules in your state, check out our state guides on paid sick leave. Some city and county gov­ern­ments also have their own paid sick leave laws.

Some States Address Pub­lic Health Emergencies

As more work­places and schools close in response to the coro­n­avirus, employ­ees and par­ents will also have to miss work, whether or not they are actu­ally ill. About half of the states that require paid sick leave address this sit­u­a­tion. Employ­ees in these states, which include Ore­gon, Wash­ing­ton, and Michi­gan, can use their paid sick leave if a pub­lic offi­cial closes their work­place, their child’s school, or their child’s care facil­ity due to a pan­demic or other pub­lic health emer­gency. Employ­ees can also use paid sick days in these states if a pub­lic health author­ity or health care provider deter­mines that the employee or a fam­ily mem­ber has been exposed to a com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­ease that may jeop­ar­dize the health of oth­ers in the community.

Again, because these laws pro­vide only a few days off at most, it’s not clear what hap­pens when a seri­ously ill or quar­an­tined employee’s paid sick days run out. Employ­ees that work for larger employ­ers may be enti­tled to time off under the fed­eral Fam­ily and Med­ical Leave Act (FMLA) or a sim­i­lar state law. Although the FMLA pro­tects an employee’s right to return to work and pro­hibits employ­ers from fir­ing an employee for tak­ing leave, it does not require employ­ers to pay employ­ees while they are out.

Here’s the big pic­ture: Employ­ees who con­tract the coro­n­avirus must stay home from work to avoid spread­ing the dis­ease. And chil­dren who are exposed to the virus must stay home from school, which means some­one must care for them. But many employ­ers won’t pay work­ers for this time—and some will even fire their employ­ees for doing the right thing by stay­ing home.

More Infor­ma­tion

If there’s a sil­ver lin­ing in any of this, it may be that the coro­n­avirus cri­sis is expos­ing and high­light­ing our need for uni­ver­sal paid sick leave. To find out more about why we need a fed­eral law guar­an­tee­ing paid sick leave, see this resource page from A Bet­ter Bal­ance.

To learn more about work­ers’ rights in your state, see Legal Consumer’s wage and hour law learn­ing cen­ter.

Filed Under: Overtime & Minimum Wage Law Tagged With: coronavirus, employee, employer, healthy families act, sick leave, state sick leave laws

About Lisa Guerin

Lisa Guerin has covered employment law topics for Legal Consumer since 2014. After getting her law degree from Berkeley Law, she worked in government, public interest, and private practice, specializing in employment law. She was a legal editor and author at Nolo for many years, where she wrote or contributed to more than a dozen books, mostly on employment issues. She volunteers with groups that help shelter and rescue dogs, and she enjoys hiking with her own Very Good Boy in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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