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Across most of the South and Midwest, state laws bar local governments from requiring employers to provide paid sick leave, effectively stripping cities of the power to enact their own labor protections.
Nearly 73 million workers live in the 18 states that now have such preemptive laws, according to a new report from A Better Balance, a legal advocacy organization focused on workplace rights, and the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“Local leaders know what’s best for their communities. To take away the decision-making power from local communities on this issue and others is very, very concerning,” said Feroza Freeland, policy director of the Southern office at A Better Balance, and one of the report’s authors.
Among the 18 states included in the report was Missouri. The legislature passed a measure in May to repeal paid leave requirements voters had approved in November that expanded access to paid sick leave for about 728,000 workers who lacked it. Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe on Thursday signed the statewide repeal into law. Local paid sick leave laws have been banned in Missouri since 2017.
Kehoe in a statement called the paid sick leave mandates “onerous,” saying they dictated when and how sick leave was provided and had “burdensome” recordkeeping and compliance obligations.
Nationwide, about 27 million workers don’t earn paid sick days, the report found. Many of them work low-wage and part-time jobs, and they’re disproportionately likely to be women, younger workers and people of color, according to the report.
“Folks are facing impossible choices between their own health — or the health of their children — and continuing to earn a paycheck to pay bills and put food on the table,” Freeland told Stateline.
In the absence of federal laws guaranteeing paid sick leave for workers, more cities and local governments have passed their own, including Chicago, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and Seattle.
But lawmakers in 18 states, mainly in the South and Midwest, have done the opposite, the report found. GOP legislators have said such paid leave requirements create financial hardship for employers, particularly for smaller businesses.
Over the past decade, in GOP-led states across the country, Republican lawmakers have tried to limit the policymaking power of Democratic-led urban centers on issues ranging from immigration to voting rights to LGBTQ+ matters.
While all of the states that preempt local paid sick leave laws are Republican-led, many conservative-led states in the Mountain West don’t have such laws.
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the National Partnership and another author of the report, said that’s because Western states tend to have more of a libertarian bent. And she said preemption laws in the South have their roots in historically racist standards that undervalue Black workers.
More than half the Black labor force — 56% — lives in one of the 18 states that prohibit local paid sick time protections, the report said.
Freeland also pointed out that the paid sick leave issue impacts not just urban centers, but rural communities as well. Many people without paid sick leave work in physically demanding jobs such as manufacturing and farming.
The report’s authors say that paid sick leave laws can help reduce the spread of illness, increase employment and wages, particularly for women with child care responsibilities, and can help recruit and retain workers.
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