Anyone who has ever experienced a prolonged illness or needed to care for a sick loved one or new baby knows the stress it can cause. Missing work for many means not getting paid, especially for those earning minimum wage.
That’s why Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly passed a paid leave program in 2019 to complement the Family Medical Leave Act – which provides job protected leave for qualifying reasons – with income replacement benefits. Since that time, nearly 166,000 individuals have received over $1.2 billion in benefits.
However, that law left some workers out of the program and this year, the legislature voted to expand the program to non-certified employees of “public school operators” including custodians, paraeducators, bus drivers, good service staff, and to non-public elementary and secondary schools
As of October 1 of this year, public and non-public elementary and secondary schools will be qualified as covered employers with respect to staff whose positions do not require a professional certification under Chapter 166 of the CT General Statutes. To be eligible for CT Paid Leave, employees must have earned at least $2,325 during their highest earning quarter within the base period (the first four of the five most recently completed quarters) and have been employed by a covered employer within the 12 weeks immediately before their claim begins.
As newly covered employers, schools will be required to register with the CT Paid Leave Authority, deduct the 0.5% contributions from covered employees’ wages and remit those contributions to the CT Paid Leave Authority quarterly.
This expansion is great news for Connecticut workers. Research from state programs shows that for young children, paid leave provides time to develop a strong bond with parents during the first months of life, increases rates and length of breastfeeding, supports fathers’ involvement in care for their new child, improves rates of on-time vaccination, reduces infant hospital admissions, and reduces probabilities of having ADHD, hearing problems or recurrent ear infections.
Paid leave may also help prevent child maltreatment by reducing risk factors, such as family and maternal stress and depression. Paid leave reduces the odds of a new mother experiencing symptoms of postpartum depression and is associated with improvements in new mothers’ health. State paid leave programs improve the labor force participation of family caregivers, reduce the likelihood that new mothers would fall into poverty and increase household incomes, and mean working people are significantly less likely to use SNAP or other public support programs in the year after a child’s birth.
Paid leave programs also help employers recruit and retain workers. According to research conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, paid leave “leads to an improvement in employers’ rating of their ease of handling long employee absences, concentrated in the first policy year and among firms with 50-99 employees.” They observed high employer ratings of employee performance in areas like attendance, commitment, cooperation, productivity, and teamwork. Additionally, a study from Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research didn’t “find any evidence of adverse effects on employers.”
We estimate that approximately 30,000 new workers will be able to participate in the paid leave program as a result of this expansion. Paraprofessionals, custodians, food service workers, and bus drivers provide essential services to students, parents and schools and now they too can focus on healing from their own serious illness or injury, serving as a caregiver for a family member in their time of need or bonding with a new child without risking their economic security.
Erin Choquette is CEO of the Connecticut Paid Leave Authority.