OPINION | Seattle Can Lead the Way Again in Paid Sick and Safe Time to Protect Retail and Food-Service Workers

by Jesse Kennemer

Imagine that you've just started a new job serving at a bustling Seattle restaurant. After six months of full-time work, you become an essential member of the front-of-house staff. Your managers depend on you and customers adore you. Until suddenly you fall ill. It's significant, and you are unable to work for the foreseeable future while you attend to your health. If your employer is following the minimum requirements set out by the Paid Sick and Safe Time (PSST) ordinance here in Seattle, it's likely you'll have exactly 26 hours of paid time as a safety net after working 40 hours per week for 26 weeks. You were making between $30 and $40 per hour including tips, but your leave will be paid out at the $16.50 minimum wage for a total of $429 before tax. By the end of your first week off the floor, you're shit out of luck and better hope there's something in your savings for rent.

Since 2012, employers in Seattle with 250+ employees have been required to award 1 hour of leave per 30 hours worked. For employers with less than 250 employees, the rate is only 1 hour per 40 hours worked. Eleven years ago, this ordinance made Seattle a leader in the state. With the passing of Initiative 1433 in 2016, Washington voters decided paid sick leave was necessary statewide. Since 2018, all employers in the state of Washington have been required to provide 1 hour of sick leave for every 40 hours worked. Seattle led the way, and then Washington caught up.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 brought a new awareness of the public's dependence on frontline service workers, especially food workers in restaurants and grocery stores. Jobs that had often been denigrated as entry-level positions for teenagers, unworthy of benefits or a living wage, were suddenly discussed as roles fit for national heroes! Grocery store workers in Seattle were given $4 per hour in additional hazard pay and gig food delivery workers were awarded an extra $2.50 per order. Kind words and a few extra dollars an hour did little to protect retail and food-service workers, who died from COVID-19 at much greater rates than the general public.

The adoration was temporary, as were the hazard benefits. The extra $4 per hour for grocery store workers ended in September of last year. Gig delivery workers lost their extra $2.50 per order in November. We have been urged to "move on" from the pandemic, while experts continue to uncover new and concerning details about the threats posed by Long COVID. Even salaried workers for local giant Amazon are facing increased pressure this year to return to the office. Unfortunately, the end of pandemic-era protections and benefits for service workers does not mean the end of COVID-19 as a threat in the workplace.

Service workers are still getting sick with COVID-19. Only now it is more difficult and potentially expensive to secure a test to confirm an infection. Reporting a confirmed infection to managers or ownership is sometimes viewed as rocking the boat, putting pressure on management to consider notifying other staff, risking a cascade of callouts that could even lead to a temporary closure and lost revenue. An employee may even feel motivated not to test in the first place to avoid the burden of confirming a COVID-19 infection and reporting it to their boss and coworkers.

Of course, service workers also face the exact same suite of pre-COVID illnesses as before. With some exceptions, the pre-pandemic attitude of expecting workers to hide or push through illness in order to avoid calling out is still prevalent in retail and food service. Whether it's COVID-19 or something that's been around a lot longer, like norovirus, service workers are still coming to work sick and exposing the customers they interact with to those same illnesses. The CDC reported in May that 40% of all restaurant food poisoning cases nationwide between 2017 and 2019 involved a sick worker. Even at the height of the pandemic, workers continued to feel pressured to work sick.

Seattle and Washington State are ahead of the national curve by providing any paid sick leave at all. There are no federal laws mandating sick leave, and in large swathes of the country it is left completely up to the employer. However, the law as it stands in Seattle still falls far short of preventing workers from putting in shifts when they should be resting at home. We can congratulate ourselves for being better than the bare minimum, or we can strive for policies that are sufficient to truly protect workers and the people they interact with.

One problem is that employers are not obligated to give workers access to their accrued leave until they have been employed for at least 90 days. Employees are not granted a magical 90-day immunity to illness during this waiting period. New employees already feel pressure not to call out to avoid making a negative impression on management. They certainly do not need additional financial pressure added to the mix.

For workers who earn a significant portion of their income from tips, taking sick leave can be a tough choice even if there is no pressure from the employee to work sick and plenty of leave available to dip into. A server who is used to making $30 or $40 per hour waiting tables thanks in large part to tips knows that if they call in sick, they will be paid only their $16.50 minimum wage. Tipped workers can put a clear dollar value on choosing to work sick instead of cashing in leave.

Seattle can lead the way again by updating the Paid Sick and Safe Time ordinance in three ways. First, require that all new employees start out with 40 hours of PSST and make it available from day one. Second, update the accrual of PSST per hours worked to 1 hour per 30 hours for employers with less than 250 employees and 1 hour per 20 hours for employers with more than 250 employees. Third, peg the wage for sick leave payouts to an average of an employee's total compensation including tips, so that a tipped worker is not accepting a massive pay cut whenever they fall ill and cannot work.

These changes would likely face major opposition from local business owners and those who represent their interests. This was also the case when the original ordinance was passed in 2012. Giving workers, especially retail and food-service workers, greater access to Paid Sick and Safe Time from the moment they begin their employment is both a public health and a labor rights necessity.

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