Paid time off comes to San Francisco payrolls on Monday 2/5/7.

The ordinance mandates that every employer with a payroll provide paid sick days to employees.  See http://www.sfgov.org/site/olse_index.asp?id=54150 for more details.  The devil is in the details as always. For every 30 payroll hours worked an employee earns one hour of sick pay.  Small employers only have to accrue 30 hours for an employee; larger employers have to accrue up to 72 hours for an employee. 

But the limit to how much paid sick time they can take is only limit by their imagination and the payroll hours they work in a year.  Let’s take a creative young worker.  He works 240 hours earning 8 hours of paid sick time and then takes it.  Every 240 hours or 6 weeks all year long he does this. At the end of the year he has taken 8 full days or 64 hours off, paid by his employer.  And he has earned over three hours of paid sick time toward his next day off.  He can turn all of his three-day holiday weekends in to four-day holiday weekends with a cold or sniffle.  Of course with a little over two days a week overtime our aggressive young worker can get nine days a year off.

Even if an employer knows an employee is doing this they cannot do anything about it.  The presumption is always with the employee.  Never with the employer who has created a job for the worker and is paying him to be productive.  The City of San Francisco has mandate, in effect, a 3.33% tax to small business payrolls in the City.

Now of course if you offer vacation that can be used for sick time then you already comply with the new ordinance.  Unless of course you only offer a week or 40 hours.  Then you don’t offer enough time off for our creative young worker and he will file a claim for the rest of his 64 plus hours and the employer will have to pay through the nose.

Of course no payroll provider software calculates deductions on a floating basis like this with out a fixed annual cap.  So payroll companies are going to be scrambling to fix their programs to handle a unique payroll deduction created in the unique City of San Francisco

Worker Compensation for telecommuters?

Are your employee’s that tele commute or have home offices subject to all the regulations, overtime, reimbursement and so on.? Are they eligible for Workers Compensation if they are working at home and trip over the dog and break their arm?  Or are they Independent Contractors and you are relieved of all those liabilities? See http://www.workerscompinsider.com/archives/000617.html on workers compensation and it’s associated links.  This is one blog I view every time it is updated for the fascinating information on workers compensation.