Mandatory paid sick leave isn’t the cure-all that op-ed writer Paul Kinzie makes it out to be. (“Paid sick leave for food workers makes us all healthier,” August 7). There’s a growing body of evidence that shows that these laws actually hurt the employees they’re intended to help.
For instance, a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research — a group supportive of paid sick leave laws — found that nearly 30 percent of San Francisco’s lowest-wage employees reported layoffs or reduced hours at their place of work following that city’s passage of a paid leave mandate. Another survey by the Urban Institute found that some city employers had scaled back on employee bonuses, vacation time and part-time help to adapt to the law’s costs, while studies in Connecticut and Seattle have also found that some employees have even lost their hours of work or their jobs following the passage of mandatory paid leave laws.
Hopefully these facts will serve as a helpful reminder that when it comes to business mandates, good intentions don’t necessarily lead to good policy.
Michael Saltsman is research director at the Employment Policies Institute.
The above originally appeared as a Letter to the Editor at the Baltimore Sun.
ReplyDeleteSocial Security, Treasury target taxpayers for their parents’ decades-old debts
“The craziest part of this whole thing is the way the government seizes a child’s money to satisfy a debt that child never even knew about,” says Robert Vogel, Grice’s attorney. “They’ll say that somebody got paid for that child’s benefit, but the child had no control over the money and there’s no way to know if the parent ever used the money for the benefit of that kid.”
Grice, the middle of five children, said neither of her surviving siblings — one older, one younger — has had any money taken by the government. When Grice asked why she had been selected to pay the debt, she was told it was because she had an income and her address popped up — the correct one this time.
Grice found a lawyer willing to take her case without charge. Vogel is exercised about the constitutional violations he sees in the retroactive lifting of the 10-year limit on debt collection. “Can the government really bring back to life a case that was long dead?” the lawyer asked. “Can it really be right to seize a child’s money to satisfy a parent’s debt?”
But many other taxpayers whose refunds have been taken say they’ve been unable to contest the confiscations because of the cost, because Social Security cannot provide records detailing the original overpayment, and because the citizens, following advice from the IRS to keep financial documents for just three years, had long since trashed their own records.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/social-security-treasury-target-hundreds-of-thousands-of-taxpayers-for-parents-old-debts/2014/04/10/74ac8eae-bf4d-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html