The Eugene Sick Leave Ordinance is scheduled to go into effect July 1, 2015. At the same time Family Forward Oregon, a grass roots organization supporting the issue, plans to take the battle for paid sick-leave to the state legislature.

The battle over paid sick leave will be moving to the Oregon Legislature next year. Family Forward Oregon, a group supporting paid sick leave, has announced that a bill will be introduced mandating paid sick leave on a state-wide basis. There are a number of legislative possibilities:

1. State pre-emption of local sick leave ordinances: both proponents and opponents of paid sick leave are seeking legislation that would prevents local governments from passing their own mandatory sick leave regulations. This would ease the administrative burden on employers who do business across multiple jurisdictions, as well as resolve the conflicting ordinance situation between the City of Eugene & Lane County. It is also possible that, even if the Legislature were to pre-empt local ordinances, it would allow pre-existing ordinances, e.g. Eugene’s & Portland’s, to stand.
2. The Legislature might pre-empt local sick leave ordinances while putting nothing in their place, thus preventing local jurisdictions from passing their own ordinances. The legislature already has done this in the case of minimum wage, when it passed a bill in 2001 prohibiting local governments from requiring private employers to pay more than the state minimum wage.
3. The Legislature might pass a bill mandating paid sick leave state-wide. No details regarding such a bill or any potential sponsors have yet been released. A paid sick leave bill was introduced in the 2013 legislature but was never passed.

PSNW wants to make mandatory paid sick leave tracking as simple as possible. Use our Time & Attendance service to keep accurate records of employees’ hours worked, and PSNW can easily calculate and track the paid sick leave available to your employees.