This blog post was written by the New York Paid Leave Coalition for our 2018 PowHer The Vote campaign.

You don’t have to wait to win the employer lottery to ensure that you have strong protections for those critical moments in life like needing to care for a seriously ill family member or bonding with a new baby, or even those everyday moments like needing to take a sick day.

From stronger infant and maternal health to equal pay and increased sharing of caregiving duties, New York’s new paid family leave law packs a positive punch for working families. Policies like paid family leave are an economic necessity for the modern workplace and for modern families. It helps retain women in the labor force, boosts lifetime earnings, increases gender equity and benefits the state’s economic growth.

In the years leading up to 2016, regular members of your community spoke out through calls, letters, petitions, letters to the editor, and more to show why paid family leave was such a long overdue law that needed to be enacted. They shared their personal experiences being fired, being retaliated against, or having to leave the workforce entirely when these life events occured.

Starting this year, 6.4 million private sector workers in New York who lacked access to paid family leave are now able to take 8 weeks of paid and job-protected time to bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill relative, or make accommodations when a family member is deployed overseas. This rises to 12 weeks by 2021.

While paid family leave means being able to care for others at critical moments in life, over a third of workers in most of our communities have no access to paid sick time when they or a child is sick. They lose pay and risk losing their job when they need to stay home sick or need to care for a sick loved one. No one should be punished for being a good parent or following doctor’s orders.

For lower-income workers, those least likely to have access to paid sick time, the loss of even a day’s wages – or worse, a job – undermines families’ economic stability. Some of the most common jobs to lack paid sick time are service occupations, including food service, home health care, and childcare workers. Nearly one-quarter of adults in the US have been fired or threatened with job loss for taking time off to recover from illness or care for a sick loved one.

Not only is this important to individual workers, but also impacts public health. Everyone’s health is at risk when people are forced to go to work sick. According to a study by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, nearly 80 percent of food service workers in the United States have no paid sick days. The Centers for Disease Control found that more than 2.5 million cases of foodborne illness each year were caused by sick restaurant workers contaminating food while they were at work. Paid Sick Days are good for public health by keeping sick employees from spreading their illness to the public.

Members of our community like you were part of the successful movement to create a mandatory minimum of 5 paid sick days for workers in New York City, BUT WORKERS OUTSIDE OF NYC ARE STILL AT RISK.

To help fight for paid sick days for these workers, state and local elected officials OUTSIDE OF NYC need to hear from you! Many more paid sick days laws need to be passed across the state.