Employers Face More State and Local Paid Family Leave Laws

There is no federal law governing paid sick leave in the United States, although the overwhelming majority of states have enacted some sort of policy, Leiwant said.

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act, enacted in 1993, requires covered employers to provide workers with job-protected and unpaid leave for qualified medical and family reasons but still leaves many gaps, said Amanda Farahany of Atlanta-based plaintiffs employment firm Barrett & Farahany.

In addition to mandating that the time off be unpaid, the FMLA has several restrictions, including, as one example, the requirement that the employer have 50 or more employees.

"The states are filling in what FMLA does not have," Farahany said.

But as the Austin case demonstrates, it's not just the states that are looking to fill in those gaps, said Albert Randall, a labor lawyer at Franklin & Prokopik in Maryland. Many municipalities, in some cases the more politically liberal locales within a more conservative state or, in other instances, local governments that feel the state is not acting quickly enough, also have gotten into the game, creating difficulties for many employers, Randall said.

"What large employers, or at least those that operate in multiple jurisdictions, are dealing with is the fact that there is no one definition," he said. "Now you're getting the states, the counties and even larger incorporated cities that are coming up with their own definitions."

Randall cites as an example family leave measures that could be so broadly defined that they include paid time off for domestic violence victims or for parents to attend school-related activities and events for their children.

"Given the promulgation of these types of regulations across the country, many employers have been forced to move to paid time off," he said. "So they either try to word their PTO broadly enough that it encompasses these various types of definitions, or they are tasked with [developing] separate leave policies and definitions for their PTO policies depending on the jurisdictions."

But Randall offered a couple of tips for employers trying to navigate this trend in paid leave: First, maintain an ability, either through counsel or the HR department, to monitor developments in this area at all levels, particularly at the county and municipal level, which are more difficult to track, Randall said. Also, be aware of the ambiguity in many of these states' laws, particularly around the issue of when an individual becomes entitled to the benefit, and identify those areas where the ambiguities lie, he added. "Much of this legislation is passing without the specificity that an employer would like," Randall said.

— Read Starbucks to Spend $250 Million on Worker Benefits After Tax Cut on ThinkAdvisor.

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