New Sick Leave Law in Illinois
From our sister blog, The Workplace Report: New Law Expands Use of Employee Sick Leave
One employment trend gaining traction recently is mandatory paid sick leave benefits for employees. A number of municipalities, including Chicago, and a handful of states have passed laws requiring employers of a certain size to provide paid sick leave days to their workers. Now the state of Illinois is joining in on the subject by mandating permissible uses of paid sick leave benefits.
Effective January 1, 2017 the Employee Sick
Leave Act (P.A. 099-0841) ensures that employees may use sick leave benefits
for not only their own personal medical needs, but also for the illness, injury
or medical appointments of a broad spectrum of family members. While the Act
does not itself require employers to provide paid sick leave, it does require
employers who do provide that benefit to allow employees to use that leave time
for absences resulting from the illness, injury or medical appointments of the
employee’s child, spouse, sibling, parent, mother-in-law, father-in-law,
grandchild, grandparent or stepparent.
The Act also provides that the benefit use for
family members must be reasonable and “on the same terms upon which the
employee is able to use sick leave for the employee’s own illness or injury.”
Although employers now must extend the permissible use of sick leave benefits
to family members, they can limit the number of days used for this purpose to
half of that which the employee accrues in a year (not half of which has been
accrued in that year). Additionally, the Act specifically states that it does
not extend the amount of sick leave benefits granted, nor does it extend the
maximum leave allowable under FMLA.
Employers who grant sick leave to their workers
should ensure that their sick leave policy conforms to this new law no later
than the first of the year.
Post Originally Authored by Margaret Kostopulos
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