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Earlier this month, the Duluth City Council passed a resolution by Council President Zack Filipovich and Councilor Elissa Hansen to create a task force to study creating an earned sick and safe time ordinance.
The 8-to-1 vote, with Jay Fosle voting no, will allow Filipovich to appoint an 11-member committee to study the issue for a year. That slow time frame has disappointed many supporters of earned safe and sick time.
Labor has been an engaged member of a statewide effort to secure these protections for the over 1 million workers in Minnesota who don’t get even one paid day for when they or a family member are ill. Locally, southern St. Louis County and the Duluth metropolitan area are the worst in the state for that coverage, with only 46 percent of workers having the benefit.
Duluth Central Labor Body delegates told Filipovich he needs to speed up the time frame and show a stronger commitment to achieving an actual ordinance.
Filipovich said they initially expected to take a year and half to gather information from a task force but have shortened that to a year.
Minneapolis has already passed an earned safe and sick time ordinance, as has Chicago. The Minneapolis ordinance requires that businesses with six or more employees provide one hour of paid sick time for every 30 worked, up to a maximum of 48 accrued hours per year.
St. Paul has a task force in place, and the issue has been studied for a long time in Minnesota.
In a huge press conference on Feb. 3, 2015, at the Depot in Duluth, a large coalition kicked off a statewide “Minnesota Benefits” campaign for earned safe and sick time. Since then, the Vision Duluth coalition said the issue ranked No. 1 in a survey of Duluth residents.
Throughout the campaign, local business owners who already provide the benefit to their employees spoke publicly about how important it is for their workers, customers and businesses.
Yet Filipovich continues to talk about the need for balance on the task force and “pragmatic concerns” about whether Duluth can do this.
Mayor Emily Larson has often expressed her support of earned safe and sick time and it appears a majority of city councilors also back it.
At a July 12 news conference, Filipovich and Hansen spoke of presenting their resolution to create a task force.
“For me, developing this resolution over the last few months with the community and President Filipovich has been a real opportunity and challenge,” Hansen said.
“We have been truly thinking about and acting upon the Mayor’s philosophy of ‘policy created without us, about us, will fail us’ and for earned sick and safe time, the ‘us’ is Duluth, our community, our businesses and our neighbors. We are not Minneapolis, St. Paul, Portland or California. We need an informed, data-driven process for our unique community makeup.”
This article is adapted from one that appeared in the July 20, 2016, edition of the Labor World.