Recently our team was able to join a conversation about a process that certain states have not experienced before. We thought it would be helpful to provide the answer to the question that resonated the most. If you have any specific industry questions or want to continue the discussion, let us know!
Colorado just had the Healthy Families and Workplaces Act signed into place today, taking effect Jan 2021.
Beginning January 1, 2021, the act requires all employers in Colorado to provide paid sick leave to their employees, accrued at one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, up to a maximum of 48 hours.
An employee:
Begins accruing paid sick leave when the employee’s employment begins;
> May use paid sick leave as it is accrued; and
> May carry forward and use in subsequent calendar years paid sick leave that is not used in the year in which it is accrued.
> Many states have had this already for years, and I have clients that fight tooth and nail to not pay additional for these things as they consider people our employees.
Can anyone provide some insight on how you communicated to your clients and/or handled implementing paid leave for temps?
This is a great question — your clients are correct in that the temporary worker is your employee and the paid sick leave accrual is indeed the employer’s responsibility for this. For instance, the typical policy states X amount of hours worked leads to Y amount of sick time in hours accrued.
Your client’s would probably be thinking, “Why would we, who only contributed a few of those hours this worker was employed for, be held responsible for the sick leave time?” With the model set to amount of hours, it doesn’t allow the temporary worker to be shortchanged in the scenario that they never work a contract as long as the minimum amount of hours and fall into a legislative loophole. That’s the reason behind the policy itself, and should be communicated to resistant parties because we are all people, including the temporary worker just trying to accrue sick leave hours.
Further communication may not even be necessary, simply rolling that cost into the already calculated burden for placement of a candidate should help tie it into operations. I am unsure if this is something that should even be line-item on an invoice, we sure don’t see that happening in typical circumstances.
However if time clocking isn’t accurate, the sick leave cannot be rewarded accurately. This is a great time to assure that all hours are tracked and hold parties accountable for the time. You may actually see a few things that could generate revenue by diving into a normal process like time tracking, as a result of the legislative changes!
I hope that helps.
Further reading:
www.rothstaffing.com/
www.
www.hr.upenn.edu/policies-and-
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RiAnn Bradshaw
Director of Marketing
BlueSky Medical Staffing Software
Nashville TN
(615) 349-1985
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