Does paid sick leave work? You should fact check that

I try to teach everyone how to be a better consumer of news and to become one, you need to fact check everything. We are increasingly hearing news from activists, not journalists; ideologues, not reporters. You need to fact check everything, whether it’s on TV, in print, or on the radio.

You have to fact check everything if you want to get the full story.

Seattle businesses argued that paid sick leave would end up hurting them because they couldn’t afford to pay sick employees. (If you don’t come to work, you don’t produce results.) Maybe the consequences of paid sick leave were being overblown, but maybe an individual business owner knows more than an activist does about their business. And maybe it’s not up to a business to spend their money on someone who is sick and not contributing to the business.

A paid sick leave law passed and businesses didn’t appear to go under because of it. Yay.

On September 10, 2013, The Stranger sarcastically asked: “Paid Sick Leave, One Year Later: Where’s Our Business-Killing Socialist Hellscape?”

They wrote:

Celebrating the one-year anniversary(ish) of Seattle’s Paid Sick Leave ordinance, today members of the The Main Street Alliance of Washington, a coalition representing more than 2,500 small businesses across Washington state, released a report that basically confirms that despite the business-killing socialist Hellscape promised by paid sick leave opponents, business is still booming in King County.

“I’m here to tell you that the sky didn’t fall,” Makini Howell, owner of Plum Bistro, said at a press conference held in her dining area this morning. “Offering paid sick days didn’t have a negative impact on my business… I’ve seen a 25 percent increase in business, hired seven new full time employees, started a food truck, opened a new location, expanded that location, and all without losing an employee.

In April of this year, Ansel Hers proclaimed: “Contrary to Dire Business Predictions, Paid Sick Leave Is Great for Seattle.”

He wrote:

University of Washington economist Jennifer Romich presented an audit of the city’s paid sick leave ordinance to the Seattle City Council this week. Her findings boil down to this: it’s an excellent program, with room to grow.

“Costs to employers and impact on businesses are very modest and smaller than anticipated,” Romich says in her presentation. “Many employers support the Ordinance — 70 percent of them, in fact — and workers view it as helpful.”

The clear position here is that the paid sick leave ordinance isn’t bad for business; in fact, it’s good. It’s a success.

But, had you fact checked, you would have found a glaring issue as to whether or not this has been a success. And oddly enough, you could have just read about it in The Stranger.

In July of last year, Cienna Madrid wrote: “Survey: Seattle Employers Are Ignoring City’s Paid Sick Leave Ordinance.”

She wrote:

A study released today by the University of Washington shows that a majority of Seattle employers were noncompliant with the city’s Paid Sick Leave ordinance when the progressive law went into effect last September. The study, which randomly sampled 1,400 employers throughout the city, found that “at or near the time the ordinance went into effect, over two-thirds of Seattle employers were noncompliant or in only partial compliance.

If people aren’t complying, how do you know it’s been effective?

Well, that was last year. Let’s look at a report three days ago, from The Stranger’s Ansel Hers. He’s the same writer who proclaimed, “Contrary to Dire Business Predictions, Paid Sick Leave Is Great for Seattle.”

He wrote three days ago:

A new report by the city auditor investigates the issue of enforcement, and specifically efforts by Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) during 2013. What they found isn’t pretty. In short, Seattle’s paid sick leave enforcement is incomplete, isn’t based on solid evidence, and often doesn’t hold employers to account or make sure employees aren’t being denied paid sick leave after they’ve complained.

When someone complains to OCR that their workplace is acting illegally by denying them paid sick leave the office usually attempts to resolve the complaints with “non-adversarial advisory letters,” rather than with fines, according to the report. What this means, the auditors found, is that “resolving” a complaint doesn’t actually ensure compliance with the paid sick leave law. Instead, these so-called resolutions are geared toward encouraging employers to do better in the future, not holding them accountable for violations or ensuring that employees receive back pay.

Seattle’s OCR concluded that seventy percent of businesses revised their paid sick leave policies because of their enforcement actions. But auditors found that OCR didn’t force businesses to provide any evidence of such revisions.

In other words, there’s no real proof the ordinance is even being enforced, yet at the same time, according to the owner of Plum Bistro: “Offering paid sick days didn’t have a negative impact on my business… I’ve seen a 25 percent increase in business, hired seven new full time employees, started a food truck, opened a new location, expanded that location, and all without losing an employee.”

Maybe that’s due to the ordinance not being enforced. I could just as easily make that argument, and I actually have data about the ordinance not being enforced effectively, which is not the wishful thinking of ideologues who want the ordinance to work. They pretend it is.

There’s no proof that the paid sick leave ordinance works. That’s not to say that the ordinance doesn’t, in fact, work. It’s simply to say you don’t have any proof it does.

If anything, you have proof that when it’s not being fully enforced, businesses stay in business, which we knew beforehand. Always fact check, especially reports from ideologically-driven sources like The Stranger.