No Big Deal: The Impact of New York City's Paid Sick Days Law on Employers

In June 2013, New York City became the seventh -- and the largest -- U.S. jurisdiction to provide workers with paid sick days, with the passage of the Earned Sick Time Act, which took effect in April 2014. Under this law, covered workers employed in New York City private-sector companies and non-profit organizations with five or more employees accrue job-protected paid sick leave at a rate of one hour for every 30 hours worked. Employees of companies with one to four workers are entitled to unpaid sick leave. The law covers about 3.9 million workers employed in the City, 1.4 million of whom did not have access to paid sick days prior to its passage. When it was first proposed, critics of the paid sick time law argued that it would lead to a loss of jobs in the City and impose a major cost burden on employers, especially small businesses. They also predicted that such a law would invite widespread abuse by employees. However, as this report shows, these fears have proven unfounded. By their own account, the vast majority of employers were able to adjust quite easily to the new law, and for most the cost impact was minimal to nonexistent. Indeed, a year and a half after the law took effect, 86 percent of the employers we surveyed expressed support for the paid sick days law

Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy

[Excerpt] We have been studying the impact of PFL on California employers and workers since the bill creating the new program was signed into law in late 2002. In this book we report on the results of extensive survey research and fieldwork that we have conducted over the past decade, analyzing the ways in which the state\u27s PFL program has benefited both workers and employers in the nation\u27s most populous state, as well as the limitations of the program. We also explore some of the lessons that can be learned from California\u27s pioneering PFL program—lessons that should be helpful not only to the many other states currently considering similar programs but also to the future development of family leave policies for the nation as a whole

New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement

[Excerpt] This book includes thirteen case studies of recent efforts by both unions and worker centers to organize the unorganized in the New York City metropolitan area. Home to some of the first U.S. worker centers and to thirty-seven of the 214 that exist nationwide at this writing, New York has the single largest concentration of this new form of labor organizing.1 In recent years, as part 4 of this volume documents, New York also has become a launching pad for efforts to expand the scale of worker centers by building national organizations, such as the TWAOC. However, most worker centers, in New York and elsewhere, remain locally based and modest in size—especially relative to labor unions, which despite decades of decline still had over fourteen million dues-paying members nationwide in 2012 (Hirsch and Macpherson 2013)

New Unity for Labor?

From the “Editor’s Introduction”: Within today’s AFL-CIO, a different set of frustrations with the bureaucratic structure and leadership is simmering. The relative lack of new organizing and the continuous toll of jurisdictional rivalries have produced a call for radical restructuring, or “New Unity Partnership” (NUP). As articulated by the leaders of some of the most powerful and dynamic of federation affiliates, including the Service Employees International Union’s president Andrew L. Stern, the promise (or threat, depending on one’s point of view) of the NUP deserves full scrutiny. To that end, we are pleased to present a forum organized by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss of the University of California’s Institute for Labor and Employment, focused on the core concepts of the NUP proposal. The edited discussion features four labor policy experts: Stephen Lerner, director of the SEIU’s Building Services Division and a leading NUP draftsman; Kate Bronfenbrenner of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Dan Clawson, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Jane Slaughter, of Labor Notes

Mental Accounting and Small Windfalls: Evidence from an Online Grocer

We study the effect of small windfalls on consumer spending decisions by comparing the purchases online grocery customers make when redeeming $10-off coupons with the purchases they make without coupons. Controlling for customer fixed effects and other variables, we find that grocery spending increases by$1.59 when a $10-off coupon is redeemed. The extra spending associated with coupon redemption is focused on groceries that a customer does not typically buy. These results are consistent with the theory of mental accounting but are not consistent with the standard permanent income or lifecycle theory of consumption. While the hypotheses we test are motivated by mental accounting, we also discuss some alternative psychological explanations for our findings.

Good for Business? Connecticut's Paid Sick Leave Law

On July 1, 2011, Connecticut became the first state in the nation to pass legislation requiring many employers to allow workers to earn paid sick leave; the law took effect six monthslater. It brought paid sick leave to large numbers of part-time workers in the state for the first time, especially in industries like hospitality and retail. The law also prohibits employersfrom penalizing covered workers who take paid sick leave, an important protection. The concerns articulated by many business associations that the law would impose heavy burdens on employers and invite worker abuse turn out to have been misplaced; instead the impact of the new law on business has been modest. One reason for this is that the coverage of the statute is limited, affecting only establishments with 50 or more workers and excluding manufacturing businesses as well as nationally chartered non-profit organizations. In short, this path-breaking legislation has brought paid sick leave to tens of thousands of Connecticut workers, with modest effects or none at all on the state's businesses.This report examines the experiences of Connecticut employers with the state's paid sick leave law. Between June and September 2013, a year and a half after the law went into effect, we conducted a survey of 251 Connecticut employers covered by the new law using a size stratified random sample. In addition, we conducted on-site interviews with managers, using a convenience sample of 15 covered organizations in the state, to assess the impact of the new law in more detail.The largest increases in paid sick leave coverage after the law went into effect were in health,education and social services; hospitality; and retail. Part-time workers, rarely covered before the law took effect, benefited disproportionately from its passage. Few employers reported abuse of the new law, and many noted positive benefits such as improved morale and reductions in the spread of illness in the workplace.Most employers reported a modest impact or no impact of the law on their costs or busines soperations, and they typically found that the administrative burden was minimal. Finally, a year and a half after its implementation, more than three-quarters of surveyed employers expressed support for the earned paid sick leave law

Walking the Talk in Multiparty Bargaining: An Experimental Investigation

We study the framing effects of communication in multiparty bargaining. Communication has been shown to be more truthful and revealing than predicted in equilibrium. Because talk is preference-revealing, it may effectively frame bargaining around a logic of fairness or competition, moving parties on a path toward or away from equal-division agreements. These endogenous framing effects may outweigh any overall social utility effects due to the mere presence of communication. In two experiments, we find that non-binding talk of fairness within a three-party, complete-information game leads toward off-equilibrium, equal division payoffs, while non-binding talk focusing on competitive reasoning moves parties away from equal divisions. Our two studies allow us to demonstrate that spontaneous within-game dialogue and manipulated pre-game talk lead to the same results.communication, fairness, bargaining

How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to fifty years of research by judgment and decision making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded. This paper argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for strategies that will improve bounded judgment because decision making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and academic insights are sure to follow from research on improvement. In addition to calling for research on improvement strategies, this paper organizes the existing literature pertaining to improvement strategies, highlighting promising directions for future research.