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Recession Prompts States to Act
The number of states looking at legislation aimed at helping employees weather the effects of the recession is exploding. HR leaders need to stay abreast of the proposed legislative efforts to make sure their organizations are prepared to successfully manage the changes.
While the nation's policymakers were busy much of this year debating the Employee Free Choice Act and healthcare reform, state legislators weren't sitting idly by and just watching. Indeed, 2009 has been a busy year for many state lawmakers, as they proposed and, in some cases, passed an array of legislation aimed at helping employees weather the effects of the recession. While that may be good news for many employees, experts say, it also presents HR leaders with a number of daunting challenges. In October, the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College issued a report detailing the flood of proposed and enacted workplace-specific legislation that has emerged from the recession, including provisions affecting paid leave, paid time-off, pay parity and unemployment benefits for part-time workers. "Where the economy is a recession, unemployment is growing and a future time of recovery is uncertain, state legislators and advocates around the country are addressing the need for policies that make it possible for people to be productive workers and care for themselves or their family members in time of need," says Julie Weber, a policy specialist with the Boston-based provider online work and family information. The Sloan Work and Family Research Network report, The Impact of the Recession on Work and Family, cites recently proposed family-leave legislation in Arizona, Massachusetts, Montana and New York; paid-sick-leave legislation in California, Illinois, Maine, North Carolina and Pennsylvania; and pay-parity legislation in Alabama, Colorado, Florida and Iowa. A number of states -- Alabama, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan and Maryland, to name a few -- are also considering bills for extending unemployment benefits to part-time workers, the group reports. "I'm definitely seeing more attention being paid to these issues on the state level," says Reid Bowman, general counsel of San Francisco-headquartered ELT, a provider of compliance training. "The number of states looking at these issues is exploding because constituents are making their voices heard." Not that this surprises Bowman. "That's pretty much how labor laws have developed over the years," he says. "If you look at federal civil rights laws, it was based on local laws. ... The same is true for paid family leave and paid sick leave. It's much more common to see progressive legislation coming from localities." Bowman says the legislation coming out of the most recent recession is far greater than what employers experienced during past recessions, including the one in the early '80s. "It's the result of the recession's severity and the receptivity of state legislative bodies to consider progressive initiatives," he says. Whatever the reasons, Bowman says, these initiatives can seriously hamper HR's flexibility. "A lot of employers are trying to deal with work/life balance, combining things like paid-sick leave, vacation and floating holidays into one paid-time-off bank," he says. "But by states now mandating paid leave or paid sick days, they're limiting [what employers can do]." It also means HR leaders with operations in multiple states must now stay abreast of ongoing new and proposed laws in each state and determine the best ways to respond, he says. HR leaders, Bowman says, need to prepare for these changes and successfully manage them. It's especially important that they take care of the "forgotten players, those front-line supervisors and managers who need to be equipped ... to manage these laws," he says. Bowman says HR should pay especially close attention to state initiatives having to do with pay parity and wage issues. "You already have a huge groundswell of activity in these areas today, plus there are new federal laws such as Ledbetter ... and a new Secretary of Labor who's focused on areas such as enforcement. So if you put pay equity and parity legislation [at the state level] on top of that, you're simply adding more fuel to the fire ... ," he says. Bowman and others don't expect to see states let up on workplace-related legislation anytime soon, especially with a national unemployment rate at 9.8 percent. "While these issues are getting attention now, I think they're important to workers whether the times are good or bad," Bowman says. Steffany Stern, a work and family policy coordinator with the National Partnership for Women and Family in Washington, agrees policymakers are showing a renewed interest in areas such as paid sick leave, given the recession and a flu pandemic. "We're now hearing from legislators who have never supported such bills in the past, but now are," she says.
November 3, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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