Compromise on paid sick days hits stumbling block

Small businesses object to being required to offer seven paid sick days every year.

CLEVELAND (AP) — A small-business group in Northeast Ohio has little hope that Gov. Ted Strickland will find a compromise on a ballot proposal requiring companies to offer paid sick days.

Strickland is trying to find agreement between businesses and the labor-led coalition pushing a statewide issue that would require companies with 25 or more employees to offer seven paid sick days to full-time workers each year.

The coalition has until Aug. 6 to submit to the state 120,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the Nov. 4 ballot.

Strickland has been meeting separately with parties from both sides and asked them Tuesday to consider his own “principles of sick leave,” which are less specific than the current proposal.

“I’m glad to see the governor finally stepping up and saying publicly what he’s been saying for a while,” said Steve Millard, president and executive director of the Council of Smaller Enterprises. “But I think that it is a little bit late and don’t know that practically it can be done in the next two weeks.”

Strickland, a Democrat who is close to unions, shares the concerns of many companies that the bill will hurt existing businesses and make the state less attractive to new ones.

COSE, which represents nearly 17,000 small businesses in the Cleveland area, is particularly opposed to a provision that would allow workers to take sick time in small increments. It says such time-keeping would be an administrative nightmare and would potentially disrupt manufacturing.

But eliminating that provision would not lessen COSE’s overall opposition to the proposal.

“We are very open to good ideas, but I think the idea of a mandate and the way this is written is not workable,” Millard said.

Dale Butland, a spokesman for the Ohio Healthy Families Act, said the group is willing to make adjustments, but he would not say if the group would reduce the number of paid sick days in the proposal.

“At this point, we don’t have any proposals from business,” Butland said.

COSE is working with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and other business groups to oppose the ballot issue. They have formed the Ohioans to Protect Jobs and Fair Benefits coalition.

Millard said the coalition wants to raise $10 million for its campaign. He said he would rather see the money invested in job expansion and to help attract businesses but said the coalition has little choice.

“We have been very vocal with the governor and lieutenant governor [Lee Fisher] in the last three months,” he said. “And they have done nothing but to say, ‘You guys try to fight it out.”’

Keith Dailey, a spokesman for Strickland, said the governor wants a compromise that “balances the concerns of employees in a way that is also workable to employers.”