As coronavirus spreads, Texas is fighting cities that want paid sick leave

Mar. 11--By Wednesday morning, Texas had 21 cases of the coronavirus. Five people, including one in Tarrant County, have tested positive for it in the DFW area. As the virus spreads, public health experts have relayed a consistent message to contain it: Stay home if you're sick.

But that seemingly simple command is easier said than done for almost a majority of adult Texans. Texas has more than 10 million workers over 18, and, according to research by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, 40% of them -- some 4 million people -- lack paid sick leave. The share of people without it is higher for service industry employees (about 75%) and Hispanics (50%). Based on proportions similar to the state numbers, it is likely that some 150,000 of Fort Worth's nearly 400,000 workers lack paid sick leave.

And in the last year, Texas state officials have been fighting with lawsuits and proposed legislation against the cities that want paid sick leave ordinances.

"No one should have to choose between staying home and really now being at higher risk with the situation with the coronavirus or having to decide to go to work sick," said Ana Gonzalez, policy director for the Workers Defense Project.

Dozens of states and municipalities have mandatory paid sick leave policies, many of them passed after promoting public health messages. After the H1N1 epidemic hit the United States in 2009, the CDC found that workplace policies, notably a lack of paid sick leave, contributed to an additional 5 million cases of the disease (there were 59 million total U.S. cases of H1N1 in 2009).

In February 2018, Austin passed an ordinance that required all private businesses to offer paid sick leave to employees, the first measure of its kind in Texas. Business leaders and the Texas Public Policy Foundation quickly filed a lawsuit, and the state of Texas, with the backing of Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined the suit. Paxton and the business leaders based their argument on classifying paid sick leave as a wage, arguing a guaranteed minimum paid sick leave would pre-empt the state's minimum wage law. Advocates for paid sick leave say it is a benefit and not a wage.

Although a majority of Texans support mandatory paid sick leave, including a majority of Republicans, stopping municipal paid sick leave ordinances became a priority for Republicans in the 2019 legislative session. Two Fort Worth legislators, Craig Goldman and Matthew Krause, sponsored two of several bills that would have blocked cities from enacting paid sick leave (neither responded to interview requests). But the bills became entwined with language that LGBTQ supporters feared would overturn anti-discrimination laws. They did not pass.

Instead, the state kept fighting in the courts, this time in lawsuits against San Antonio and Dallas, which passed paid sick leave ordinances similar to Austin's last year. San Antonio's and Austin's laws have not gone into effect because of temporary court injunctions. Dallas's law went into effect in August, but a federal court decision that could force an injunction is pending. And Dallas won't enforce compliance of the law until April 1.

The Fort Worth City Council has not proposed or discussed mandating paid sick leave for private employers.

With coronavirus concerns increasing, the AFL-CIO and other groups have called on business leaders and the state to drop their litigation against the cities, and they claim that Paxton, Gov. Greg Abbott and others have made a public health matter political. "The state cannot say they are protecting employees and protecting citizens and still on the other side of that show up in court and say that paid sick time is a bad policy," said H. Drew Galloway, executive director of MOVE Texas, which helped organize the movement for paid sick leave in San Antonio.

Annie Spilman, the director of the National Federation of Independent Business and a spokeswoman for ASSET, a coalition of business groups opposed to local paid sick leave ordinances, said the organizations speaking out against the lawsuits were using coronavirus "for their own political messaging." "If this discussion is going to be had and there is any change in law that regulates employment practices, it needs to be done at the state level and or federal level," she said. "All stakeholders need to be involved and it needs to go through that process."

Sen. José Menéndez and Rep. Diego Bernal sponsored bills seeking statewide mandatory paid sick leave in the 2019 legislative session (employers would've been required to offer six days a year). Neither bill, SB 1826 and HB 3728, was put up for a vote in committee.

Asked whether NFIB and ASSET would support state paid sick leave, Spilman said they "would be part of the conversation" but did not say they would support it.

Gonzalez said: "The cities took the necessary steps to try and prevent something like this. I think it is definitely the state and federal government's responsibility to address this in the future."

This week, President Donald Trump has mulled providing federal paid sick leave to patients affected by coronavirus. But energy sector leaders have warned him against passing any major paid sick leave policies.

Because of the coronavirus Abbott requested that state-regulated insurance plans waive costs associated with coronavirus testing and diagnosis. The 5 million Texans who lack insurance will not benefit from the request, nor will the roughly two-thirds of insured Texans whose plans are not state regulated. Anne Dunkelberg, who oversees health care policy for the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, said Texas politicians should call on Congress and the state legislature to guarantee funding for diagnosis and treatment of coronavirus and call on Congress to follow Abbott's request regarding state-regulated plans for all insurance plans.

Dunkelberg noted that a lack of paid sick leave may be the biggest deterrent to getting people to follow suggestions for controlling the coronavirus. "For some people that may be even more powerful than the fact that they are uninsured," she said.

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