Paid Family Leave Bill: Bad for families, Bad for workers, Devastating for small businesses.

Our lame duck legislature is on the verge of increasing taxes and creating a new entitlement program, the Paid Family Leave program.

The program would increase workers Temporary Disability Insurance payroll tax by .01% and give all employees the opportunity to take off work for up to 10 weeks per year and to collect up to $500.00 per week in the event of any kind of “family emergency.”
Woman giving birth already enjoy this benefit, as do workers for large companies with more than 50 employees. This new law, if passed, would extend the benefit to employees of any size company, even those with 1-49 employees.

For .01% of your salary you can take off work for 10 weeks, get paid $500 per week and you can do it every year! The companies don’t have to kick in any money. This sounds too good to be true! You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true.

I asked my employees, “What would you think of a government program that took another .01% of your salary and gave you the ability to take off work for 10 weeks per year for a family emergency?” At first they were all for it. “If one of my family members gets really sick, I would want to have that benefit,” said one. “It’s like an insurance policy,” said another. “But, we’d want to make sure the money really went to fund that program,” they all said.

There’s the first catch. The current Temporary Disability Insurance fund has already been raided to the tune of $75 million dollars to plug gaps in the bloated Trenton budgets. My employees didn’t like that, and they weren’t surprised.

There’s another big catch. Unlike big companies with over 50 employees, there is no guarantee that you will have a job when the 10 weeks is up. My employees didn’t like that at all.

In my small business we have faced these types of situations. While it is never easy, always costly, and requires everyone to work harder and learn new skills, the vast majority of the time we, as a team, have been able to come up with solutions that worked reasonably well, for the company and for the employee. This law would create a “one size fits all” response to situations that are best handled in an individualized manor. “Well, couldn’t we still do that?” one of my employees suggested. “Of course we could, if you wanted to,” I said, “but then what are you getting for the money that the government is taking from your paychecks?” “Get on your computer and start blogging to stop this nonsense,” they said.

On Monday December 10, I, and a few of my colleagues on the Northern Monmouth Chamber of Commerce’s Government Affairs Committee will be joining hundreds of other business owners who are taking time away from our companies to go to Trenton and try to talk some sense into the Assembly Labor Committee. You can help by contacting members of the Assembly Labor Committee who have indicated that they support this program. Their contact information is:

Egan, Joseph V. - Chair (732) 249-4550
Van Drew, Jeff - Vice-Chair (609) 465-0700
Cohen, Neil M. (908) 624-0880
Oliver, Sheila Y. (973) 395-1166
Scalera, Frederick (973)667-4431

*********************

A quick follow up from last week’s column for my regular readers: Last Thursday, Joseph Doria was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, in an unscheduled vote, to be the commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs. If that fact was reported in any of the major New Jersey daily newspapers, I missed it.

Also published in The Courier and The Bayonne Evening Star-Telegram