By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Seasonal and part-time municipal employees who work fewer than 20 hours a week should get paid sick time as a matter of “fairness,” Princeton council members decided Monday ahead of likely mandating paid sick leave on the private sector next year.
They will earn sick time at the rate of one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked, a benefit those employees would be eligible to use after 90 days of working for the town.
“To me, this is an issue of fairness and humanity,” Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller said at Monday’s council meeting.
Providing extra sick pay would cost the town an estimated $4,033 a year, according to an analysis by town administrator Marc D. Dashield. He arrived at that number based on the assumption that part-time and seasonal employees would use the same amount of sick time as other municipal employees do.
His report also looked at the costs of replacements filling in for the sick employees. As part of his presentation, Mr. Dashield also asked that council require that employees make a documented effort to track down a replacement when they are sick. Officials, though, modified that to say employees are requested that they try to find a replacement, but don’t have to document they did so.
The town already provides paid sick time to full-time employees and part-timers who work more than 20 hours a week, Mr. Dashield told council members on Monday.
The change comes as town officials next year are expected to mandate that private sector businesses provide sick pay to their employees, as around 10 other towns in New Jersey have done. The measure even would apply to businesses headquartered outside of Princeton who employ people who work in town for more than a set number of hours per year.
The impetus locally to take that step came from the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, a political organization aligned with the Democratic Party and labor unions. Earlier this year, representatives came to a council meeting, at the invitation of Mayor Liz Lempert, to make their case.
Mayor Lempert has said she supports the paid sick leave mandate; her views are in line with Democrats in the state Legislature and with the Obama administration. Unlikely to get paid sick leave past Gov. Chris Christie and Congress, advocates are going through municipal city halls instead.
Those New Jersey communities with the sick pay requirement have exempted their municipal employees, but Princeton officials said they did not want to create a mandate that they would not be willing to abide by as well.
“But I think many of us felt that it wouldn’t be fair for us to impose this on businesses in town without making sure we’re getting our own house in order,” Councilwoman Heather H. Howard said at the meeting.
Councilwoman Jo S. Butler, who said she supported expanding paid sick leave to all employees, noted that officials were basing their support for doing so based on reasons other than what was originally stated: public health impacts.
“We haven’t really looked at that,” she said. “We’ve looked at the financial impact that this might cause, but we’ve made no determination that our community is safer, from a health perspective, if we were to do this.”
The municipal recreation department employs the most seasonal help. Ms. Butler predicted pool user fees will go up and warned that if enough pool staff don’t report to work on a given day, either all or part of the pool will not be able to open. She cited that as a possible loss of revenue.
