Battle Lines Drawn As Austin Considers Paid Sick Leave Mandate

AUSTIN, TX — With city council members poised this week to vote on a proposed ordinance requiring all employers to provide sick leave for their workers — historic legislation that would make Austin the first Texas city with such a mandate — the battle lines have been drawn.

And in this fight, opponents are engaged largely in a war of words. One one side of the debate are those in the "free market" camp who eschew any sort of regulation on business pitted against those in the trenches advocating for the working class framing paid sick leave as a fundamental human right. Advocates estimate that 223,000 employees — about 37 percent of the local workforce — receive no sick pay.

Reliance on rhetoric from the proposal's opponents is rooted on imagined detriments to business owners, particularly mom-and-pop shops, in the abstract rather than on actual damages given the lack of local precedent for any such initiative from which to derive concrete examples buttressing their fears. For their part, supporters of the move took issue with a recent editorial in the Austin American-Statesman calling the proposed ordinance "rushed" and "unfair" in its planned implementation.

The editorial cites a single source — Frank Fuentes, chairman of the U.S. Hispanic Contractors Association — to buttress its premise that the ordinance would make it more expensive to do business in Austin. Its author, longtime Statesman editorial writer Alberta Phillips, further complained the ordinance draft was only recently unveiled on Jan. 19 ahead of the Feb. 15 council vote — not enough time for the idea to be properly vetted or to engender substantive dialogue from a variety of local voices.

"That is absurd," Phillips wrote. "Even a righteous goal can be unfair when the means to that end is flawed."

The editorial writer expressed further concern about the perceived financial impact on smaller employers, including nonprofits relying heavily on interns or part-time workers. She invoked the specter of Latino- and black-owned businesses in positing those enterprises as somehow particularly vulnerable financially to the paid sick leave requirement. She also vaguely cited "the toll on undocumented workers," the proposed ordinance might pose.

That's absurd, proponents of paid sick leave inferred in response to the editorial's claims. José P. Garza, executive director of the Workers Defense Project; Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leadership; and Julieta Garibay, Texas director and co-founder of United We Dream released a joint statement rebuking the editorial writer's imaginings of corporate ruin vis a vis the proposed ordinance.

The triumvirate took particular issue with the notion that society's most marginalized would somehow be hurt without paid sick leave — the very segment of society they work hard to protect daily as the lifeblood of their nonprofits' collective mission.

“It is disappointing, despicable, and desperate that opponents of paid sick days would use immigrant families as a pawn to stop this policy," their statement reads. "As grassroots leaders that have been on the front lines in the fight against Texas’ anti-immigrant SB 4, we find it disgusting that big industry associations, with a track record of exploiting undocumented labor, would falsely cite concern for undocumented workers as a talking point against a policy that is good for Austin working families."

(Some context: Senate Bill 4 is legislation championed by Gov. Greg Abbott that gives police greater leeway to ask about residents' citizenship status as a way of rooting out the undocumented at the behest of federal immigration officials. It also calls for fining and even jailing elected officials deemed to lax in cooperating with federal immigration policy.)

But back to the paid sick leave ordinance. Aside from editorial writer Phillips, the proposal has garnered opposition from the Austin Chamber of Commerce predicated on "unintended and unknown" impacts and the Austin Independent Business Alliance with expressed fears that businesses "would be laying people off or cutting back hours to pay for an extensive sick leave policy."

Yet dozens of local business owners have come out in favor of the move. In a letter released by Work Strong Austin, local small business owners — the folks Phillips and Fuentes believe would be most harmed by the ordinance — gave their unqualified support for the initiative.

"We recognize that our employees are not only Austin's workforce — they are also parents, customers, innovators and neighbors," business owners wrote. "By ensuring all working people have the opportunity to earn paid sick days, our entire community and economy can grow stronger."

The Nov. 15, 2017, letter was signed by several top executives, among them heads of some of the city's most prominent businesses:

• Charlie Jackson, CEO, Acceleros.
• Meaghan Perkins, Director of Operations, Beetnik Foods.
• Jodi Mozeika, Business Team Leader, Black Star Co-op Pub & Brewery.
• Matt Botticelli, Co-founder and Co-owner, Botticelli’s South Congress.
• Max Hoberman, President and Founder, Certain Affinity.
• Eric Goff, Co-founder and CFO, East Side Compost Pedallers.
• Philip Flesher, Founder and Owner, Exstratus.
• Walter Moreau, Executive Director, Foundation Communities.
• Joseph Strickland, Co-founder and Co-owner, Home Slice Pizza.
• Alejandro Ruelas, Co-founder, Latinworks.
• Adam Orman, Co-founder and Co-owner, L’Oca d’Oro
• James Aldrete, Owner, Message Audience & Presentation, Inc.
• Shawn Cirkiel, Founder and Owner, Parkside Projects (Parkside, The Backspace, Olive and June, Bullfight, 800 Congress, Jugo).
• Regina Rogoff, CEO, People's Community Clinic.
• Amanda May, Founder and Owner, The Purple Fig Eco Cleansing Co.
• Kelly White, CEO, the SAFE Alliance.
• Beau Armstrong, CEO, Stratus Properties Inc.
• Valerie Ward, Founder and Co-Owner, Sweet Ritual.
• Bonnie Cullum, Managing Director, The Vortex, Butterfly Bar.
• Matt Wright, Co-Founder and Co-Owner, Wright Bros. Brew and Brew.
• Dan Gillotte, General Manager, Wheatsville Food Co-op.
• Cary Ferchill, former CEO, World Satellite Network Inc.

"No one should have to choose between paying the bills or taking care of themselves or a loved one when they're sick," the business leaders wrote. "The City of Austin can prevent the escalation of illness and transmission to others through a citywide paid sick days policy."

President Barack Obama expressed similar sentiments as he championed paid sick leave as a federal initiative during his time in office. Obama urged Congress to deliver a bill to his desk requiring seven paid sick days for all American workers but Congress failed to act on the measure.

"One of the biggest problems that we have is that there are 43 million Americans that don't get paid sick leave," Obama said. "That means that no matter how sick they are or how sick a family member is, they may find themselves having to choose with being able to buy groceries or pay the rent or look after themselves or their children."

In its own statement opposing the proposed local ordinance, the Austin Independent Business Alliance employs oft-used free-market arguments in opposing the local measure: "Let the free market work!" "Stay out of the way of success!" "Leave it to the business. Employees need to prove their loyalty and trustworthiness." "If not offered, employees have the right to work elsewhere. This is still a right to work state, right?"

Yet such trepidation is based on an abstraction, given the lack of another Texas model as precedent. Despite such doom-and-gloom scenarios by detractors of a locally enacted paid sick leave ordinance, multiple municipalities elsewhere in the country — including some of the nation's most thriving cities — have passed similar ordinances without the feared existentialist threat to the business sector.

Across the country, 41 one paid sick time ordinances have passed at various cities, counties, and states and have managed to maintain thriving economies and a robust small business base. Supporters of the ordinance cite some salient figures to back up such assertions:

• In Massachusetts, which passed their paid sick time law in 2014, a similar op/ed to the Statesman's emerged predicting paid sick leave would be a "job-killing mandate." Yet employment in the Massachusetts hospitality industry alone since implementation in July 2015 has increased from 351,500 to 367,900 — a 4.67 percent increase. Those statistics are vetted by U.S. Department of Labor analysts at the Bureau of Labor Studies here.
• A similar scenario was seen in Philadelphia, which passed a paid sick time ordinance in 2015. In that state, the National Federation of Independent Business predicted the paid sick leave ordinance would reduce employment by 4,000 jobs. Instead, employment in the leisure and hospitality industry there grew from 66,200 in March 2015 to 78,200 in October 2017 — an increase of 18.1 percent. Department of Labor verified those stats here.

After passage of a 2011 paid sick time ordinance passed in Seattle, the University of Washington conducted an implementation study. Among its findings:

• "All three measures of employment robustness – the number of Seattle firms with more than four employees, total number of Seattle employees, and total Seattle wages – grew in absolute terms over the first year of the Ordinance."
• "Data do not support the notion that the Ordinance caused businesses to leave Seattle or close Seattle locations. In fact, the number of employers grew more in Seattle than in comparison cities after the Ordinance took effect."
• "Initial fears were allayed by modest use. When employers first learned about the ordinance and the leave mandates, many feared that offering the required leave would substantially increase their labor costs and generate staffing shortages. After operating under the Ordinance for at least a year, most of these initial fears had faded. In general, workers used far less paid leave than employers had anticipated."

Such longitudinal evidence notwithstanding, battle lines separating an ideological divide have been drawn locally as Austin attempts its own version of a paid sick leave ordinance. If passed, the measure would be historic in its implications. Ahead of the Thursday, Feb. 15, council vote on the measure, at least one thing is already certain: With the proposal listed as the 49th item of the Austin City Council agenda, it's going to be a long night at City Hall.

The council meeting begins at 10 a.m. in council chambers, 301 W. 2nd St. A live stream can be viewed by clicking here.

>>> Image via Shutterstock