labor lawAdivision of labor law center

You can add Maine to that list of states where employers could see legislation for a mandatory sick leave requirement on employers. There is a coalition of lobby groups, worker groups, and others—including the Maine Women’s Lobby and more than 30 other organizations—that are asking the state legislature to pass a bill that would be a legal sick day minimum in the state.

The bill is already in existence, having been introduced into the state legislature by Democrat Rep. Jackie Norton from Bangor, Maine. Rep. Norton’s bill is titled “An Act to Care for Working Families” also known as LD 1454. It would mandate that all employers with 25 or more employees have to allow their workers to build up one hour of sick leave—paid sick leave—for every 30 hours that they work. Do the math, and that comes to four hours of sick leave every three weeks, or a full day of paid sick leave after a month and a half of working 40 hour weeks. The total in a year that workers can build up, according to the Norton law, would be 72 hours of sick day a year, or nine days.

This system would be quite similar to the way that San Francisco, California, has set up its own minimum sick day law. There, the law is already in effect, and as we learned a few blog posts ago, the city is still learning how to enforce the regulation, and how to ease employers into the new requirement without burdening the smaller employers out there too much.

I can’t say just yet where the bill in Maine stands at the moment—I will do further research on the topic and keep my antenna out there to pick up on the latest news, my loyal readers.