By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton Council will get a staff report possibly as soon as in two weeks on the financial impact of providing paid sick leave to municipal employees who do not get that benefit already.
Mayor Liz Lempert said Monday that officials plan to discuss whether to change that internal policy, amid a broader push that she and other officials support that requires private sector employers in Princeton to provide their employees with paid sick leave.
“None of us have seen the report yet,” she said. “My guess would be that people would want to see the report and then have a discussion and then make a decision about how to move forward.”
Town administrator Marc D. Dashield said Monday that the report would analyze the financial and administrative impacts if the policy were implemented. The town already provides paid sick time to full and part-time employees, Mayor Lempert said.
The municipal recreation department would likely be the place most impacted since it employs a large number of seasonal employees.
Princeton officials were lobbied earlier this year by the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, a liberal political organization, that urged them to require mandated paid sick leave. In particular, they want Princeton to follow the lead of other towns in the state that have bestowed that benefit. Those towns, however, made municipal employees exempt.
“My sense from the consensus of council was that we didn’t feel comfortable with that, that if we were going to be turning to the local business community that we didn’t want to be hypocritical about it,” she said.
Originally, the town delayed any action saying it wanted to wait until after the summer to revisit the possible private sector mandate. “I don’t see us moving on this particular issue – because I know there’s a lot of people who have strong feelings about it – until the summer’s over,” Mayor Lempert said in June.
So far, the topic has not come up.
But Mayor Lempert said that as the calendar draws closer to the busy Christmas shopping season, she would not expect the council to revisit the issue as a policy affecting private-sector businesses until 2016.
The requirement would follow the employee, meaning companies located outside of Princeton but who have employees who work in town for more than 80 hours a year would be on the hook.
