BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — Louisiana Senator Regina Ashford Barrow introduced a bill last week in state legislature that would require employers in the state to provide sick leave benefits to employees.
If Senate Bill 289 were to pass, employers with five or more full-time employees would be required to provide one hour of paid sick leave for every 40 hours worked up to 52 hours a year to full-time employees. Businesses with fewer full-time workers would be required to do the same but the sick leave could be unpaid.
The bill also outlines a variety of reasons the employees must be allowed to use the sick time for including their own medical treatment or care, the medical treatment or care of a family member, injuries sustained as a result of domestic violence or sexual assaults, the closure of the employee’s child’s school due to a public health emergency, and other reasons.
Employees would be given access to their earned sick days after being employed for 90 day and unused sick days would roll over to the next year.
The law would allow employers to require workers to provide a doctors note if their absence lasts longer than two days.
While federal laws in the United States do not mandate sick leave benefits, Louisiana would join 16 other states that have started to require employers to provide some form of paid sick leave to workers over the past decade starting with Connecticut in 2012.