It feels like supporters of New Mexico’s Healthy Workplaces Act are living in a different world, have no idea what it’s like to operate a small business in New Mexico and have tied rhetoric to perhaps big box store employee horror stories.
The Act would force all employers to provide one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours an employee works, topping out at 64 hours annually. That’s eight days, not a horrendous amount of sick leave.
Our experience is most employees use very little sick leave during the year and are more interested in doing the job than milking time off. However, there are those mathematicians who know when the use/lose date is arriving and within 15 minutes can pre-calendar flu, allergies and headaches on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings.
They are who will abuse this gift. Of course they are also the employees not interested in doing their job as much as they are soaking a small business for all they can. It doesn’t matter how much these employees are paid, it’s never enough.
Providing sick leave in this amount will force many small businesses to cut vacation, take away vacation, cut pay or eliminate positions. The best-operated small business can’t just absorb such a large new benefit.
The Act, House Bill 20, also does not affect public employers. That could be because most public jobs give sick leave to employees, along with vacation, personal days and an insane retirement plan mostly on the backs of taxpayers. We’ve come full circle now, because taxpayers are predominantly the people working for small businesses.
It’s bad enough that our state government has been so poorly run for decades we cling to the basement of every negative list in the country. Few of those who sit in state offices could run their own business. It takes hard work, planning, skill and knowledge and experience. Small businesses take a risk every day they open the door. They’re risking their time, their money.
Most of the Roundhouse politicians who want to thrust this burden on small businesses know little of what they speak.
Now these “leaders” seem hell-bent on trying to force businesses, the ones that pass along that money politicians love to spend as their own, to provide a benefit they can ill-afford.
When the pandemic is behind us and small businesses are allowed to operate much as before March 2020, we’ll find out how bad off we are. We’re still riding high on Washington and Santa Fe hand-outs. Those hand-outs will have dried up, we’ll have a $30 trillion plus federal debt, no more free rides nor bonus payments for unemployment recipients and that will be on the backs of taxpayers.
Legislators should be worrying less about forcing small businesses to add a benefit and looking more to see how they can help small businesses.