San Diego’s Law is in Effect

As you know, voters approved Proposition I in June. This law focuses on a higher minimum wage and more paid sick leave. It only affects your employees while they are working within the city limits, regardless of where your company is based. If your employee spends 2 or more hours within San Diego’s city limits in any week in the year, you will be subject to this law… but only for those employees and only during the time they are within the city limits. There are no exceptions for small businesses.

The real challenge will be for those of you with employees who are in and out of the city and trying to track time versus location. You’ll need to decide if you want to put the time and effort into that administrative nightmare or just plan to meet the law’s standards for all your employees or at least all your field employees.

San Diego Minimum Wage

Minimum wage for employees working within the San Diego city limits is now $10.50 per hour, effective 7/11/2016. In 6 months (on 1/1/2017), this will increase to $11.50 per hour.

San Diego Paid Sick Leave

I contacted the City Council last week and was told they were creating implementation guidelines that would result in the law being closer to California’s sick leave law. The implementation guidelines for the paid sick leave component won’t be finalized for another two weeks. The City Council made changes to the draft on Monday (7/11/2016) and will review it again in two weeks for final approval. However, this didn’t stop them from making it immediately effective.

Yesterday (7/12/2016) I was told by a representative for the City Council that a draft will be available very soon even though they can’t guarantee it won’t be changed when presented for final review. Here are a few highlights of what the draft includes:

  • Amount of paid sick leave: You can limit usage to 40 hours per year.
  • Method of earning paid sick leave: (1) Front-loading the 40 hours or (2) accrual of 1 hour of paid sick leave per 30 hours worked.
  • Accrual cap: 80 Hours … This is huge! The original law had unlimited accrual so this cap will make it much easier to implement and coordinate with other time off
  • Plan design: You don’t need to specifically have a sick leave plan but you will need a paid time off plan that meets the sick leave law’s requirements and protections, regardless of what you call it. This is very much like California’s version.

There are likely to be a few other requirements but this information will allow us to revise policies now so sick leave balances will be accurate. Don’t hesitate to contact us for help!

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

  

  

  

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.