Commentary: Policymakers Should Expand Emergency Paid Leave in Next Coronavirus Package

"Policymakers should expand access to emergency sick days and family and medical leave in a future round of coronavirus relief legislation."The Families First Coronavirus Response Act created two new types of emergency paid leave,^[1] but left out tens of millions of workers, including the vast majority of employees in places like grocery stores, pharmacies, and warehouses who remain on the job even during “stay-at-home” orders and are at heightened risk for contracting COVID-19.^[2] In addition, the law’s longer-term paid leave does not cover any medical leave for workers who contract coronavirus or are caring for a family member who does. It also leaves out some caregivers of elderly relatives and adults with disabilities. Policymakers should expand access to emergency sick days and family and medical leave in a future round of coronavirus relief legislation.

Many Workers Don’t Qualify for New Leave

The law provides ten days of paid sick leave for workers affected by the coronavirus: those who are ill or quarantined, or caring for an ill or quarantined family member or a child whose school or child care has closed. The law also provides ten additional weeks of paid caregiving leave, limited to parents whose children are out of school or child care.

These new benefits will help millions of workers. But there are large coverage gaps that leave out many workers who are at heightened risk of exposure to the virus.

The largest group of workers left out of the leave programs are those working for employers of 500 or more workers. The Families First Act excludes employees at large businesses from the paid leave benefits and their employers from federal reimbursement for any emergency leave they provide.

It’s become clear that the large employer exclusion leaves out many of the front-line employees who remain on the job because they have been excepted from stay-at-home orders.^[3] Most workers at grocery stores, pharmacies, general merchandise stores, and warehouses are excluded from the new paid leave law (see Figure 1).^[4] These workers,^[5] many of whom earn low wages^[6] and receive limited benefits, risk exposure to the coronavirus and potentially to spread the virus.^[7] Many have little choice but to go to work ill, or to leave children at home alone or in the care of older siblings who are supposed to be distance learning.

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Excluding so many of these employers whose workers are considered “essential” under stay-at-home orders may worsen the striking racial disparities in coronavirus diagnoses and fatalities,^[8] as Black and Hispanic workers are substantially overrepresented in low-wage jobs at those workplaces due to long-standing racial barriers to economic opportunity.^[9] For example, 24 percent of warehouse workers are Black and 32 percent are Hispanic, even though Black and Hispanic workers constitute just 12 percent and 18 percent of the workforce, respectively.^[10] Black and Hispanic workers are also overrepresented as cashiers and in other critical service-sector occupations.^[11]

Some, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, have argued that large businesses should be exempt from the new law because many already offer paid sick days.^[12] While more large employers provide sick days than smaller employers, many companies do not have permanent paid sick leave policies,^[13] and others have such restrictive and poorly administered policies that most workers don’t know they qualify or fear punishment for taking leave.^[14] And few large employers offer longer-term family and medical leave benefits, particularly for workers facing large-scale school and child care closures.^[15]

Certain service-sector industries are particularly unlikely to offer paid leave — for example, about 35 percent of retail workers lack paid sick days and 85 percent lack paid family leave benefits.^[16] While some companies announced temporary paid sick leave policies in response to the coronavirus crisis, many fall short of the new law’s requirements: some provide fewer than ten sick days, exclude part-time workers, exclude franchises, or impose onerous requirements to access the benefit.^[17]

In addition, the paid leave law and subsequent rulemaking^[18] broadly exempt health and emergency workers on the front lines of the crisis, denying them not only the longer-term paid caregiving leave but also the shorter-term paid sick days. The law says that “health care providers” and “emergency responders” can be exempt from both sick days and family leave, and the Department of Labor (DOL) is interpreting these terms so broadly that it could leave out about 13 million workers, according to DOL. This means that millions of workers exposed to the virus in the line of duty may not qualify for a single sick day under the law.^[19]

Finally, millions of workers are left out of the caregiving leave benefits in the law. The law excludes most of the federal workforce from the longer-term paid family leave, providing those workers with only two weeks of emergency paid sick days, apparently because of a drafting error.^[20] The federal government is the nation’s largest employer, and this omission excludes more than 2 million workers from the longer-term emergency paid leave. In addition, the law exempts small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, which employ 34 million private-sector workers,^[21] from providing any school or child care leave to parents if doing so may cause their companies to shutter. DOL also interprets this provision very broadly, and has indicated it will not require small businesses to submit any paperwork to prove they meet that criterion.

Policymakers Should Expand Access to Leave in Next Relief Package

To expand access to paid sick days and paid family and medical leave, especially to the workers who need it most, we recommend that Congress consider the following changes in a future round of coronavirus relief legislation:^[22]

• Provide emergency paid sick days and paid family and medical leave to workers in companies with 500 or more employees. This would expand coverage to roughly half of private-sector workers,^[23] about 60 million in all — including the substantial majority of workers who remain on the job even amid widespread closures — and give their employers federal reimbursement for the emergency leave.
• Provide health care providers and emergency responders with emergency paid sick leave that they can use if they get sick or need to be quarantined. These workers are at heightened risk of contracting COVID-19 and should have access, at a minimum, to paid sick leave if they contract the virus.
• Expand paid family leave to include all federal employees.
• Expand the longer-term leave to include coronavirus-related medical and family caregiving leave. The ten additional weeks of “paid family and medical leave” provided in the Families First Act only provide benefits to parents whose children’s schools or day care providers have closed; they do not provide any benefits for workers who contract the coronavirus or are caring for a family member who does. The version of the Families First bill that originally passed the House on March 14 with substantial bipartisan support included this provision, but it was subsequently pared down to school leave only.
• Expand coverage of caregivers for older adults and adults with disabilities. The law provides caregiving leave only to parents whose children’s schools or child care has closed (the rule clarifies that this extends to disabled adult children). This leaves out family caregivers for other relatives who have lost their usual source of care, such as older parents or siblings with disabilities, as well as people who otherwise receive care from direct service providers.