Rotten Timing: Burdening Employers Is Bad Idea Made Worse In An Economic Slump

The economy is sputtering, businesses are struggling and closing, and the unemployment rate is the highest it's been in 25 years.

So many members of Congress decided inexplicably that this would be a great time to pile expensive new mandates onto employers.

First is the Healthy Families Act, introduced in the House in May by Rosa L. DeLauro, US Representative (D-Conn.), and in the Senate by Edward M. Kennedy, US Senator (DMass.), and Chris Dodd, US Senator (D-Conn.)

Employers with 15 or more employees would have to give workers one paid sick hour off for each 30 hours they work, and employees could earn up to seven paid sick days per year. They also could use that time to care for sick family members or to seek help to deal with domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking.

The idea is similar to a sickday mandate pushed in Ohio last summer by a union-backed coalition. The group considered putting the Ohio Healthy Families Act on November's ballot, but Ted Strickland, governor, moved to block it, realizing that would torpedo Ohio's already lagging economy, and the group backed off.

The initiative would have meant increased costs and a loss of productivity for Ohio employers. Businesses indicated they would be forced to cut elsewhere, either by reducing other benefits or by cutting the number of employees.

A federal mandate would have many of the same ill effects.

Also in May, Alan Grayson, a first-term US Representative and Democrat from Orlando, Fla., home of Disney World, introduced the Paid Vacation Act, which would require companies of 100 or more workers to provide a week of paid vacation to both full- and part-time employees who had worked for a year.

Within three years, the oneweek mandate would apply to companies of 50 or more, and companies of 100 or more would have to give two weeks' paid vacation.

"Wouldn't it be great for our economy if more people went on vacation?" he wrote to Floridians in a column in The Orlando Sentinel.

The Sentinel, by the way, editorialized against this overly simplistic idea, pointing out that three-fourths of employees already have vacation time, and workers who don't have it either have entry-level jobs or work for companies that can't afford it.

Forcing those companies to offer paid vacation simply leads to layoffs or reduced pay.

Plus, though employees would have to provide at least 30 days' written notice for their vacation, the bill doesn't give employers the right to deny such requests for schedule confl icts. That further encumbers business operations.

A key way businesses compete for the best employees is by luring them with benefits. Employers know best what they reasonably can afford to offer.

The federal government shouldn't insert itself into that process.

As if those two proposals weren't onerous enough, in early June, the U.S. House passed a bill that would provide four weeks of paid parental leave to federal workers who are new parents through birth, adoption or fostering. That's nice, but right now?

Federal employees already have the 12 unpaid weeks that federal law mandates and they can use their paid sick and vacation leave during that time.

The bill, now in a Senate committee, has been estimated to cost their employers, the U.S. taxpayers, $850 million over its first five years.

These are bad moves in the best of times, but now they're extremely reckless.- Columbus Dispatch