Paid Sick Leave is now a major issue that employers in California must deal with.
- Changes must be made to many employee handbooks
- If a company changes their vacation policy to PTO most payrolls services software is not able to accommodate that on the employees pay stubs.
- Many employers don’t not know or understand which is the best way to implement the new paid sick leave.
The New Sick Leave Law is causing many employers some major issues in a lot of ways.
If a company decides to change their vacation policy to (PTO Paid Time Off) as the vehicle that it wants to use to meet the paid sick leave law, in most cases their payroll services will not be able to accommodate that with their current software. Because of this many payroll services try to force employers to take some of the PTO time and designate that time to meet the 3 days of paid sick leave. This will cause many employers much grief when an employee sees that instead of having 5 PTO days they now only have 2, because 3 of those days have been designated for sick leave. No payroll company has the right to force employers into this scenario and yet they are doing it all the time.
According to the sick leave law here in California employers have the right to change their vacation time to PTO retroactive to July of 2015. PTO qualifies for paid sick leave as well as vacation and personal time. It is unfortunate that the payroll people are bullying employers into doing something that they should not have to do. If an employer is allowing his employees to accrue five days of PTO the easiest way to track the sick time is to keep track of the number of sick days that employees take. The reality is the employer is making available more than what the law requires and so at the end of the day they will be fine.
If you would like more information on this please contact us and we will be happy to help you.