New Sick Leave Legislation May Require Policy Revisions
Paid sick leave is one of the hottest employee benefits this
year, with a number of municipalities, including Chicago, some counties,
including Cook County, and a handful of states enacting 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 Illinois Employee Sick Leave
Act (P.A. 099-0841) will require employers to allow employees to use their 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." In
other words, an employer cannot impose greater restrictions on the use of sick
leave for family members than it imposes for an employee's personal medical
conditions. Therefore, if an policy currently allows sick leave use in half day
increments for the employee's illness, injury or medical appointment, then it
should impose that same requirement if the sick leave use is for an eligible
family member.
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). In other words, if an employee accrues
12 days of sick leave each year, he or she may use six of those 12 days for
eligible family member use, even if, for instance, the employee only has six
days of sick leave in their bank at the time.
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.
Many local governments have maintained sick leave policies that
restrict the use of sick leave to the employee only or to family members which
do not include all relatives identified in the legislation. Those policies will
need to be revised prior to January 1st.
Post originally authored by Margaret Kostopulos, Ancel Glink
0 comments:
Post a Comment