(a) More than two million domestic workers in the United States, and approximately 10,000 in San Francisco, work in the homes of their employers, cooking; cleaning; caring for children, older adults, people with disabilities, and others; and performing other labor.
(b) Domestic workers generally are paid low wages, are unlikely to receive health benefits or paid time off from employers, and are at high risk of wage theft and other violations of worker protections. This vulnerability is long-standing and has deep historic, economic, and social roots in racism and sexism. Domestic workers remain uniquely vulnerable, in part because they generally work in isolation, behind the closed doors of private homes.
(c) In 2006, the people of the City and County of San Francisco (“City”) enacted the nation’s first Paid Sick Leave Ordinance (PSLO), covering employees working in the City. Paid sick leave (PSL) is an important public health tool for infectious disease control, as workers without it are more likely to place others at risk by going to work sick or sending their children to school or daycare while ill.
(d) Despite the PSLO, few domestic workers in the City have access to PSL. Only 17% of domestic workers in San Francisco surveyed by researchers from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York reported that they receive any paid time off as an employment benefit. Only 33% of those domestic workers reported that they had had even one paid day off during the previous year, whether for sick leave, vacation, or a paid holiday. See Isaac Jabola-Carolus, “Profile of San Francisco Domestic Workers,” December 2020, on file with the Clerk of the Board of Supervisors in File No. _____.
(e) The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of ensuring that all workers have access to PSL for illness, caregiving responsibilities, and other purposes. This is particularly true for low-wage workers, like domestic workers, who may be unlikely to have adequate resources to take unpaid time off when ill or when caring for an ill family member. The COVID-19 pandemic has further increased both the economic vulnerabilities of domestic workers. Domestic workers have suffered disproportionate job losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic and public health response, peaking as high as 60% in May 2020. See the foregoing “Profile of San Francisco Domestic Workers.” But domestic workers are less likely than other workers to have access to unemployment insurance due to misclassification, informal employment arrangements, and immigration status.
(f) Domestic workers are at heightened risk of contracting COVID-19 and other infectious diseases because they typically work indoors, often in close proximity to their employers and those for whom they provide care. Domestic workers frequently work for multiple different individuals or families, increasing their exposure risk. Domestic workers generally are not protected by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act or its California counterpart, and they are unlikely to be provided with personal protective equipment or other COVID-19 safety measures.
(g) Employers of domestic workers that wish to provide the workers with PSL often lack access to systems to facilitate accrual and tracking of benefits. For domestic workers who work for multiple employers for varying lengths of time, PSL that does not allow for aggregation across employers may not provide workers meaningful access to PSL. Misclassification of employees as independent contractors and informal employment arrangements further reduce domestic workers’ access to PSL.
(h) This Article 12 establishes a portable PSL system, which will allow Domestic Workers to earn and consolidate PSL benefits from several employers and to keep and access that paid leave as they move between jobs. The system would allow Hiring Entities to track PSL accruals, which would be transferred from the Hiring Entity to the Domestic Worker when the Domestic Worker needs to take PSL. PSL would not necessarily be used with the same Hiring Entity or Hiring Entities from which the funds are drawn.
(i) The purpose of this Article 12 is to provide Domestic Workers in the City access to the essential benefit of PSL, administered through the portable PSL system. By expanding access to PSL, this Article is intended to mitigate the economic harm Domestic Workers are suffering due to the pandemic, support the City’s pandemic response, and improve public health more broadly.