On The Push For Paid Sick Leave

Democrats, nearly as powerless in Washington these days as conservatives, have taken to pushing their liberal agenda in the few remaining states over which they still have some control. One of the more recent examples of this trend is the renewed push for state-level requirements for paid sick leave in several states, including Maryland.

The issue of requiring employers to provide sick leave is one of many which can be hard to understand for many voters not reflexively opposed to government intervention. On this issue, among others, the Democrats have done a good job of portraying themselves as the defenders of the working class, thereby casting Republicans as only concerned with helping big business. The narrative is compelling and can be hard to break.

But requiring employers to provide paid sick leave is a manifestly bad idea. This extends from broader arguments about liberty and the role of government in the private sector economy, to the point that requiring paid sick leave is simply bad policy. Like proposals to increase the minimum wage, it hurts employers of all stripes, particularly small businesses, and ultimately hurts the very employees Democrats claim to be trying to help.

By requiring paid sick leave or other benefits, Democrats would force small businesses to expend greater resources for the same number of employees. Ultimately, those businesses would be forced to choose one of two options, in order to absorb rising costs: lay off some employees, or pass the added costs on to the consumer—or both. In the first scenario, employees, many of whom are likely low-income workers, would lose their jobs. In the second, everyone who patronizes a particular business would be forced to pay more—likely including at least a few workers who lost their jobs due to the same policy of mandatory paid sick leave.

When the government attempts to mandate employee benefits, whether in the form of an elevated minimum wage, paid sick leave, or the employer mandate in Obamacare, it is ultimately small businesses and workers who must pay for it. Higher wages and paid leave are great—but let businesses reach those decisions on their own, with the help of natural market forces and without government interference.

Mandating Employee Benefits is a Terrible Idea

“My administration wants to work with members in both parties to make childcare accessible and affordable, to help ensure new parents have paid family leave, to invest in women's health, and to promote clean air and clear water, and to rebuild our military and our infrastructure.”

--President Donald Trump, address to Congress, February 28, 2017

The issue of requiring employers to provide paid sick leave and family leave benefits is, quite simply, complicated. Supporters of the policy have done a good job of portraying themselves as the defenders of the working class, thereby casting conservative opponents as only concerned with helping big business. The narrative is compelling and can be hard to break.

But requiring employers to provide paid family leave, sick leave, and similar benefits is a manifestly bad idea. This extends from broader arguments about liberty and the role of government in the private sector economy, to the point that requiring paid sick leave is simply bad policy. Like proposals to increase the minimum wage, it hurts employers of all stripes, particularly small businesses, and ultimately hurts the very employees Democrats claim to be trying to help.

By requiring paid sick leave or other benefits, the government would force small businesses to expend greater resources for the same number of employees. Ultimately, those businesses would be forced to choose one of two options, in order to absorb rising costs: lay off some employees, or pass the added costs on to the consumer--or both. In the first scenario, employees, many of whom are likely low-income workers, would lose their jobs. In the second, everyone who patronizes a particular business would be forced to pay more—likely including at least a few workers who lost their jobs due to the same policy of mandatory paid sick leave.

When the government attempts to mandate employee benefits, whether in the form of an elevated minimum wage, paid sick leave, or the employer mandate in Obamacare, it is ultimately small businesses and workers who must pay for it. Higher wages and paid leave are great—but let businesses reach those decisions on their own, with the help of natural market forces and without government interference.

The Most Progressive Platform in History

Much as the 2016 Republican platform largely adheres to conservative orthodoxy, the Democratic platform approved in Philadelphia this week reaffirms many liberal principles. The main difference between the two is that while the GOP platform makes few substantive changes to basic party principles (a summary of the changes that are present can be found here), the Democrats’ platform veers far to the Left, even when compared to the historically liberal platform of four years ago.

One of the sharpest illustrations of this can be found in the evolution of the abortion plank over the past several decades, as described by Fred Lucas at the Daily Signal. For the first time the platform expressly calls for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment prohibiting most direct federal funding of abortions—previously a bipartisan and noncontroversial issue. Democrats also refuse to call for abortion to be “rare”, until 2008 a hallmark of Democratic language, and the abortion section as a whole is the longest and most detailed in platform history.

But the abortion plank is nowhere near the only section of the platform that has taken a dramatic left turn. The platform takes stridently liberal positions on same-sex marriage, LGBT protections (opposing “bathroom bills” and religious liberty laws), and gun control (endorsing a variety of tailored gun bans and other measures designed to effectively choke the Second Amendment. And the platform is the first in history to endorse eliminating the death penalty entirely, calling it a “cruel and unusual form of punishment”. The vast majority of the American public disagrees on all points.

On economic and other domestic issues, the platform endorses increased regulation, amnesty for illegal immigrants, a universal health care system which goes even further than Obamacare in expanding the reach of the federal government, a $15 minimum wage, and more. All of those proposals are like siren songs promising everlasting prosperity, but all have been repeatedly discredited in practice. Obviously nothing to appeal to conservatives or moderates there.

Only on issues of national security and foreign affairs does the platform show any recognition of a need to appeal to voters beyond the most liberal and isolationist parts of the Democratic base. While less willing than its Republican counterpart to endorse military action or a leadership role for America in world affairs, the platform at least acknowledges a watered-down version of American exceptionalism, expresses a need to defeat ISIS and radical terrorism (of course without explicitly naming radical Islam), and takes a strong stance in opposing the power-hungry tactics of Russia and North Korea. However, even here the platform fails by praising the Iran deal and devoting a section to the supposed national security threat of climate change.

If 2016 was merely a referendum on the two major party platforms, the choice would be easy, and voters would be able to pick based on policy and principle alone. But of course, both nominees make the choice an agonizing one.

The full text of the 2016 Democratic platform can be found here.

Policy Spotlight: Minimum Wage

This will be the first of a semi-regular feature here at The Conservatory. Every so often, I’ll post “Policy Spotlights” focusing on a particular issue currently in the news (such as gun control, immigration, or the minimum wage), and discuss and defend my own views on that issue.

The question of raising the minimum wage has long been seen by Democrats as one of their most effective wedge issues, peeling away working class votes from Republicans while solidifying their base of poor, urban, and primarily minority voters. But like so many other liberal policies, raising the minimum wage—though it purports to help the poor and working class—in reality hurts them the most, leading to a one-two punch of lost jobs on the production side, and higher prices for goods and services on the consumer side.

The minimum wage is perhaps one of the prime examples of how government intervention and interference in a free market economy stifles economic growth and productivity. As the government, whether federal or state, raises the minimum wage, companies are forced to spend more and more money to pay their existing workers. Any thoughts of expansion or of hiring new workers are quickly discarded, and soon, merely to break even, companies are forced to let people go.

And the first workers to leave are the lower skilled, disproportionately poor and minority workers, whose jobs are by definition the easiest to be performed by a smaller number of people. Lower-skilled, entry-level jobs—those most likely to earn minimum wage and therefore most likely to be affected by any mandated wage increase—are consolidated, under the basic principle that either some of the lowest skilled jobs are cut, and a few people lose their jobs; or else the company keeps every such job, paying an increased salary, and face negative profit earnings—and with it, the potential that the entire company will fail, causing everyone to lose their jobs.

So, many poor, working-class, and minority workers become unemployed through the increase in the minimum wage. But this won't be the end of their hardship, because they still have to buy goods and services, as consumers, and participate in the marketplace from the other side as well. And here is where the other angle of a minimum wage increase becomes apparent, because even after cutting some jobs, many companies will still face an increased drain in resources.

To attempt to make up for this, and avoid having the entire company fold or become unprofitable, they will be forced to raise prices on goods and services, with any additional revenue going directly to those increased wages. This will hurt all consumers, of course, but the ones hit hardest will be the recently unemployed, those who may have had a difficult time paying for an increase in product prices even had they not lost their jobs to the effects of a minimum wage increase.

And still, even with all these measures, many small businesses will likely still be forced to close at some point after sustaining unacceptable losses. The number of businesses that would close, along with the number of jobs lost and the amount of price increases, would of course depend on the exact amount the minimum wage was raised. Hillary Clinton’s proposed $15 per hour minimum would hurt businesses, workers, and consumers alike, but this would pale before Elizabeth Warren's onetime proposal of an increase to $22 an hour.

Of course, a government mandate of a variety of additional worker benefits such as paid family leave, which would in effect act as a second minimum wage increase, would make the effects even worse. There's a reason that in Los Angeles, and many other places where workers have succeeded in lobbying for an increase in the minimum wage, businesses that initially supported the movement are regretting their actions, and unions are lobbying for their members to be exempt.

Meanwhile Donald Trump has predictably attempted to take both sides of the issue, from categorically opposing a minimum wage increase during the primary to championing higher wages for workers and seeming to support minimum wage legislation at the state level, while leaving his official stance ambiguous on a federal raise.

While this relentless flip-flopping is by now Trump’s expected position on virtually every issue, conservatives should embrace the minimum wage issue. Boldly making the case that raising the minimum wage hurts, rather than helps, the economy and low-income workers will finally begin to counter the simplistic liberal narrative on the minimum wage with real facts, rather than the more common incoherent rambling—good from both a political and policy standpoint.