Employees of multi-state firms may benefit from paid sick leave policy spillover

What’s the issue with paid sick leave and multi-state firms?

Many states and localities have passed labor standards to raise the floor on job quality, including mandating that firms provide paid sick leave (PSL) for their employees. However, there are no paid sick leave mandates at the national level, and even state localities may differ on enacting these policies. But, what about multi-state firms that do business in areas with PSL mandates and states without PSL mandates? Shift Project co-directors Daniel Schneider, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy and Kristen Harknett, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, examined the possibility for these intra-firm spillovers.

To test this possibility, Schneider and Harknett took advantage of Shift Project data collected from 31,804 workers at large, multi-state retail and food service firms in the United States who were employed in jurisdictions without PSL mandates.
 

What does the research say? 

The researchers found that multi-state firms were motivated to provide PSL benefits for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Providing PSL benefits more broadly allowed firms to have a more simplified and streamlined HR practices, policy, and compliance tracking. 

• The PSL policies often conferred business benefits such as improved operation execution, reduced employee turnover, and even higher sales.

• Firms were sometimes pressured by their employees to provide particular benefits that they observed nearby employees enjoyed.

“We find consistent evidence of intra-firm spillovers,” the researchers say, “Workers employed in non-PSL mandate places are significantly more likely to report having access to PSL at work when employed at firms that have greater exposure to PSL mandates in their operations.”
 

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Photograph by AP Photo/Mark Humphrey