blogs.courant.com
The Senate voted 18 to 17 Wednesday to pass the nation’s first state mandate on private employers to offer paid sick days. The measure has Gov. Dannel Malloys support as it goes to the House where it is expected to pass. This act by the General Assembly and the Governor is just another hostile move towards small businesses in Connecticut.
The law requires affected companies to give one hour of sick time for every 40 hours of work, up to a maximum of five days a year. It is effective Jan. 1. It applies to dozens of specific types of service workers at companies with more than 50 employees. Exempt are manufacturers, municipalities, and YMCAs.
Senate Minority Leader John P. McKinney, R-Fairfield, noted that benefit is required of a large restaurant, but not the school cafeteria where his children eat daily.
“It’s OK if our kids are served food from someone who is sick, but it’s not OK if someone goes into a restaurant?” McKinney said. ctmirror
In a perfect world all the arguments for this bill would make sense, but as anyone in the workplace that has sick days already know, it’s a free day off with pay. How many of us have used that privileged day for things other than illness? So under the guise of letting mommy stay home to care for her child or daddy to stay home as not to share his germs with fellow workers, the small business owner is being mandated to pay them whether that is the reason or not-it’s theirs to use.
Once again the fine print in these bills are never explained either. Why are manufacturers exempt? Why? What makes them different than the small business owner when it come to the argument of paying employees to stay home when they are sick? Ditto municipalities. Do theses employees have non contagious germs or something? This is deja vu where the healthcare reform was passed and mandated for the public but wasn’t good enough for Congress to be part of.
The course the State of Connecticut is on is one of ruin. Higher taxes which will suppress if not depress growth, a state Earned Income Credit (EIC), which on the federal level is the most abused tax policy in place and can be expected to become abused here as well, and the counterproductive estate taxes for small business owners. In addition the Governor has implemented policies that have already been proven in other states and at the federal level has having been failures such as the Amazon Tax (virtually unenforceable as even acknowledged by Department of Revenue Services Commissioner Kevin Sullivan), and the luxury tax tried at the federal level back in 1991, which had such a devastating affect on those industries that it was eventually repealed.
It’s clear in my mind that the financial course the state is on is a recipe for disaster, and should come as no surprise when our neighboring states begin to see signs of recovery while we wallow in the stranglulation of regulations and higher taxes.
