Miwaukee suburbs protect their citizens from paid sick days

Last week the New York Times noted that 60 million American workers, almost half of all private sector workers, do not have paid sick leave. This made it virtually impossible for them to stay home, as the President had advised, if they experienced flu like symptoms last week.

The Times wrote:

...more than 160 countries ensure that all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness.

If President Obama is serious about responsible action to control infectious disease threats, he should back legislation to grant Americans at least seven paid sick days a year — long enough to stay home until an influenza infection subsides. Then virtually all Americans could heed his advice, and we would all be safer.

In November Milwaukee voters voted overwhelmingly (69% to 31%) that all Milwaukee employers should provide their employees with paid sick leave benefits.

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce (MMAC) has opposed the measure and used the courts to delay its implementation. It argued that providing employees with paid sick day benefits would be bad for business. An MMAC spokesman even called the law "a sort of terrorism."

Several Milwaukee suburbs, genuflecting to the laissez faire gods, have legislated away their citizens right to pass such laws.

Presumably the free market will protect these communities from future pandemics just as their city councils have protected the free market from one more onerous regulation.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cooper will rule on the referendum's legality later today.

The New York Times editorial is linked.

Swine Flu scare demonstrates need for paid sick days

Earlier this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that anyone with flu-like symptoms stay home from work or school to minimize the danger of spreading the swine flu.

For millions of mainly low-wage workers this is an impossibility because they lack paid sick days.

Last November voters in Milwaukee overwhelmingly passed an ordinance that would guarantee all workers paid sick days.

Ironically Mayor Tom Barrett who joined the Milwaukee Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce in opposing this important labor and health and safety reform is now urging workers to stay home and is asking employers to honor the intent of the law he has refused to implement.

Haven't the last eight years of experimenting with voluntary regulation demonstrated the abysmal failure of this laissez faire approach?

New York Times columnist Judith Warner has written a column arguing that paid sick days is an idea whose time has come. It is linked.

Milwaukee's leadership fails to fight for family supporting employment

Robert Kraig and Amy Stear have an excellent column on the abysmal failure of Milwaukee's economic and political elites to make family supporting job creation a priority.

Since the late 1970's the Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC) and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce (MMAC) have controlled the region's economic development strategies promoting an approach that relies on business tax breaks and subsidies. The result-Milwaukee has lost thousands of family supporting unionized jobs. It now has the 7 th highest poverty rate in the country and the second highest black white unemployment ratio.

Stear and Kraig write:

The visceral opposition to the sick days referendum is also about something larger. Like the reform battles 100 years ago, the sick days referendum advances an economic populism that the local political establishment and its allies in the business community would prefer to sweep under the rug. As the city has hemorrhaged family-supporting jobs, the political and business elite have steadfastly refused to allow job quality to become a central public policy focus. The paid sick days ordinance is a dramatic step in the opposite direction endorsed by over 159,000 Milwaukee voters.

Forcing a major issue into the public sphere over the objections of entrenched interests accustomed to having their way at City Hall is exactly what La Follette era Wisconsin progressives hoped direct legislation would achieve. The city's disgraceful decision not to legally defend an overwhelming vote by its own citizens is a black mark on the progressive history of Milwaukee. But it is not too late for the city to reverse course and defend the ordinance in the next stages of the legal process. We believe it is incumbent on Mayor Tom Barrett and the Common Council to stand up for Wisconsin's democratic traditions and use the power of their offices to defend the people's right to decide.

The entire column is linked.

Obama effect and economic benefits of sick pay

Researchers have identified an "Obama effect" suggesting that President Barack Obama's accomplishments reduce African American test-takers anxieties and increase their sense of competence leading to improved test scores.

The study has not been peer reviewed and it was based on a small sample. But it offers some preliminary hope that Obama's election may help reduce the racial achievement gap.

The article on the study is linked.

UWM professor, Marc Levine and I have a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op ed, "Sick pay is smart economically," refuting the "Chicken Little" hysteria of opponents of Milwaukee's new paid sick leave ordinance. It is linked as well.

MMAC's lawsuit will not create family supporting jobs or shared properity

In November Milwaukee voters overwhelmingly passed an ordinance that guarantees workers the right to earn paid sick days. Milwaukee joined San Francisco and Washington DC as the third city to require these benefits. The referendum passed by a margin of almost 70% to 30%.

Despite the overwhelming margin of victory, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce (MMAC) has aggressively opposed the measure.

Two weeks ago the organization filed a lawsuit against the city seeking to strike down the law. The MMAC is also asking for a temporary injunction to block the city from enforcing the legislation that is scheduled to go into effect on February 10, 2009.

The MMAC's opposition, while short-sighted, is not unexpected. Business organizations have consistently opposed social legislation like laws outlawing child labor and discrimination or regulating business behavior like the Clean Air Act. For the past three decades they have aggressively opposed any effort to raise the minimum wage even as its real real value has fallen to historic lows. Their consistent opposition makes some sense since such legislature imposes costs or at least prevents businesses from externalizing their costs, thus reducing rates of profit. The long-term benefits of increased employee loyalty and productivity and reduced hiring and retraining costs are seldom acknowledged.

But Tim Sheehy and other MMAC spokesman have stooped to new a new low in their desperate attempt to discredit Milwaukee's new ordinance.

The MMAC's Steve Bass, a former Republican assembly operative , labeled the new law "a sort of terrorism."

It is perverse to equate providing employees with time off when they or a child is ill with suicide bombings. The former provides workers with a humane benefit so that they no longer need to choose between their job and caring for their family, while the latter uses murder to terrorize the general population. Additionally, Bass's rhetoric belittles the lives and sacrifice of the victims of terrorist attacks and those who have died trying to bring the perpetrators of political violence to justice.

Not to be outdone, the MMAC's President Tim Sheehy claims the ordinance is affecting job growth in Milwaukee and predicts "dire economic consequences."

But Milwaukee's labor market had collapsed and the city's workers were experiencing what the UWM Center for Economic Development has characterized as "a stealth depression" long before this ordinance was passed.

Exactly what job growth is Mr. Sheehy claiming the City has lost?

The country is experiencing the worst recession since the Great Depression. We lost half a million jobs last month and 2 million in the last year. Business investment has collapsed, a victim of the housing bubble's collapse and the resulting financial sector's meltdown.

Last year, Wisconsin lost 32,4000 jobs. The Department of Revenue is projecting that Wisconsin will lose another 37,700 manufacturing jobs (7.7% of the state's total) and 121,000 construction jobs( 5% of all construction jobs) next year.

Milwaukee is hemorrhaging jobs. Two thousand two-hundred and sixty-six (2,266) more Milwaukeans were unemployed in September 2008 than a year ago, long before the sick day ordinance was passed. Milwaukee ranks a dismal 34th among 50 cities in the annual rate of employment growth, has the 2nd worst rate of black male unemployment and the worst black-white unemployment ratio in the nation.

The simple fact is that long before the sick day referendum passed, business investment in new plant and equipment had collapsed and companies were laying off workers at an alarming rate. In addition, many of the firms like Crazy Water, Outpost Natural Foods, and Lackey and Joys, whose spokesmen have opposed the ordinance, won't abandon their Milwaukee location in response to a marginal cost increase because they require access to the city's market. As realtors always tell us: "location, location, location!"

Mr. Sheehy's concern over Milwaukee job loss is also hard to take seriously since the MMAC has consistently promoted policies that have destroy local jobs and drive down wages.

The MMAC was a vocal proponent of NAFTA and other free trade agreements that have contributed to a reduction of employment in high-wage traded-goods industries, growing wage inequality, and a steady decline in demand for workers without a college education.

NAFTA alone cost Wisconsin 25,403 (-0.9%) jobs between 1994 and 2006.

The MMAC has also aggressively promoted trade with China. The organization's China Business Council has even sponsored tours of China. Yet, between 2001 and 2006 Wisconsin lost 38,000 jobs because of the growing trade deficit with China.

And Mr. Sheehy actively opposed the County's advisory sales tax referendum aimed at providing a dedicated source of revenue to the County's beleaguered transit system. Sheehy actually authored a letter to Milwaukee's County Board members urging them to uphold County Executive Walker's veto of the referendum.

Mr. Sheehy surely knows that one of the major impediments to economic development in Southeastern Wisconsin is the spacial mismatch between large numbers of unemployed workers, disproportionately African-American, living in Milwaukee's central city, and employers located in suburban and ex-urban locations who have had difficulty finding qualified workers. Key to addressing this problem is a mass transit system that links people to jobs. Yet Sheehy and the MMAC opposed the County's advisory referendum designed to address this mismatch. Republican partisan politics trumped investing in the regional economy. The economic consequences of the MCTS's deterioration is nothing short of "dire."

The "stealth depression" in the city of Milwaukee's labor market calls for bold, new departures in public policy. Yet the MMAC has opposed initiatives in public investment, regional cooperation, reducing metro-wide racial segregation, industrial policy, and community benefits agreements that should be part of an aggressive anti-unemployment strategy in the city.

The MMAC's use of scare tactics to oppose the sick pay legislation is consistent with this dismal record. Rather than waste the city's scarce tax dollars in a lengthy court case, the MMAC and the firms it represents should obey the law. They might just discover that when businesses treat their workers humanely, their employees will be more loyal and productive and replacement and training costs will decline.

Why Paid Sick Days Is A Sound Economic Development Measure

WHY PAID SICK DAYS IS A SOUND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT MEASURE

As academic researchers on economic development and workplace productivity, we urge Milwaukeeans to vote YES on the city’s sick leave referendum.

Milwaukee has the seventh highest poverty rate in the nation, a 51% African American male jobless rate and the largest racial disparities in unemployment and poverty in the country. 43% of the city’s workers earn less than $20,000 a year and many are among the 122,230 Milwaukeeans (47% of the private workforce) who do not have paid sick days.

In this economic context, everyone agrees that Milwaukee needs more family-supporting jobs. Yet, employment that lacks paid sick days forces employees to choose between their jobs and caring for their families. A job that does not provide employees with paid sick days so they can care for their families is not a family-supporting job.

The lack of paid sick days hampers economic development in Milwaukee in myriad ways:

• It costs workers job stability, as employees who become too ill to work or who take off to care for a sick child or parent are frequently fired;

• It costs companies in workplace stability and productivity, in turnover, training, and absenteeism, and health care expenses;

• It contributes to Milwaukee’s high rates of student absenteeism as older siblings stay home to care for their sick younger brothers and sisters because their parents are denied that right;

• It creates public health obstacles to workplace productivity, forcing sick employees with contagious diseases to work.

Opponents say mandatory paid sick days are a worthy objective but not economically viable. Some have even invoked the possibility of recession as a reason to oppose improving our city’s workplaces.

But these opponents simply offer the same discredited methodology and arguments that backward employers and their academic apologists have used throughout history in opposing child labor laws, the minimum wage, workers compensation, clean air and water regulations and virtually every other labor standard this nation has adopted. In every case the opposition characterized the new labor or community standard as a job killer. And in every case, after the standard was established, the business community adapted, the economy grew and our country, its workers and their families were better for it.

In the 1990’s business lobbyists used the very same arguments now being used against paid sick days to oppose raising the minimum wage. But after states and even cities raised their wages above the national minimum, economists found that the chicken little scenarios of the opponents did not occur: that incremental increases in the minimum wage did not increase unemployment or cause minimum wage paying firms to lay people off.

Facing similar dire warnings, San Francisco enacted a paid sick leave ordinance in 2007. However, despite an economic downturn affecting all counties in the Bay Area, San Francisco maintained a competitive job growth rate that exceeded the average rate of nearby counties.

Internationally, of the twenty most competitive economies, only the United States does not guarantee its workers paid sick leave.

Economies and firms can try to compete on price and cost. But in world where two billion people live on less than two dollars a day, Milwaukee will not succeed by trying to get poor. The only way Milwaukee can thrive is by getting smart- competing with high skill, high productivity, high-wage employees.

Indeed, opponents of the sick leave referendum, such as the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) point out that many of their members already provide paid sick leave. These MMAC members should welcome higher standards for all employers, which would protect them against unfair competition from businesses without standards, and would prevent a destructive race to the bottom in workplace standards.

Providing all Milwaukee workers with paid sick leave is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do because firms that treat their employees humanely benefit from increased commitment, inventiveness and productivity, the keys to competing in an increasingly competitive global economy.

We urge the citizens of Milwaukee to VOTE YES on the sick day referendum.

Zohreh Emami, PhD, Professor of Economics, Alverno College
Marc Levine, PhD, Professor of Urban Studies, UWM Center for Economic Development
Michael Rosen, PhD, Economics Instructor, Milwaukee Area Technical College