HB 1959 would remove exemption for small employers when it comes to Washington state's paid-leave program

The state should be rethinking its Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program, which often benefits people who are not in need of taxpayer help at the expense of low-income workers and employers. Instead, Washington state lawmakers are considering expanding payments to the program.

House Bill 1959 has a public hearing scheduled for 8 a.m. on January 17 in the House Labor and Workplace Standards Committee. The bill seeks to take away an exemption lawmakers promised small businesses back in 2017 when the program was created.

Saddling small employers who are trying to survive our state’s business landscape with more expenses to help bail the state out of a costly, solvency-challenged program that is unfair to many workers and businesses is short-sighted. When employers are forced to pay for a state-imposed benefit like this, it lessens their ability to offer employees with higher wages or other benefits that can be more useful to an individual workforce.

PFML benefits don’t help all workers. Many employees will never need or use them. Worse, in many cases, money taken from a worker and his or her employer is then used by another worker with higher wages who is not at all in need of taxpayer help. That’s cruel.

Using hourly wage estimates from the Employment Security Department, here are the earnings of people who took the program’s tax dollars in the past fiscal year (July 2022 through June 2023):

Up to $18/hr: 12%

Between $18 and $24/hr: 21%

Between $24 and $35/hr: 26%

Between $35 and $61/hr: 26%

More than $61/hr: 16%

Paid leave benefits aren’t primarily helping people in need, they’re going to middle- and upper-income wage earners.

Lower-income workers shouldn’t be paying higher-income workers to bond with babies or take medical time off from work. They should be able to keep more of their wages for their own needs. And businesses should be able to offer their employees meaningful benefits that meet their workforce’s individual needs, not have money tied up in a misguided state program.

–– Elizabeth Hovde is the Director of the Centers for Health Care and Worker Rights at Washington Policy Center. She can be reached at ehovde@washingtonpolicy.org