When the Connecticut legislature wrapped up their business for the 2017 session, they also closed the window for this year on a paid leave mandate in the Constitution State with SB0001 failing to garner the support necessary to make it out of the senate. The bill, titled An Act Concerning Earned Family and Medical Leave, would have mandated eight weeks of paid family medical leave for established employees and funded the benefit through employee contributions with the state absorbing the costs to administer the program. Earlier in the session, it was thought that Connecticut would become the 5th state in the nation with a paid family medical leave mandate as bipartisan negotiations over the legislation were ongoing. In the end however, the dictate was seen as potentially taking too much of a toll on small businesses and it died in committee. Three states currently mandate paid leave: California, Rhode Island and New Jersey. Paid family leave becomes effective in New York on January 1, 2018. You may recall that the Washington DC city council passed a universal family leave mandate back in December of last year that DC Mayor Muriel Bowser allowed to become law without her signature. Well, now some DC Council members are looking to make changes to the 4 month old dictate which funds up to 8 weeks of leave through a new 0.62% tax on employers. A number of amended versions have been submitted. One would require the employees to fund 0.42% of the new tax and employers the remaining 0.20%. Another would drop the new tax from 0.62% to 0.20% for large employers with 50 or more employees and a payroll of $3.5 million or more. It also drops the tax to 0.40% for those with between 5 and 49 workers. Still a third bill would require large employers to self-administer the program and limit the tax to 0.1% while exempting employers with fewer than 50 employees.
