The Assembly on Monday gave final passage on Monday to legislation, opposed by NJBIA, that would expand the paid Family Leave law’s job protection requirement to smaller employers with 15 or more workers, instead of the law’s current employee threshold of 30.
“Unfortunately, this bill is another classic example of Trenton being tone deaf to the concerns of our smallest employers,” NJBIA Chief Government Affairs Officer Christopher Emigholz said after the Assembly voted 46-25 to send the bill to the governor.
“The 30-employee threshold in the law now was the product of a thoughtful compromise between a Democratic governor and a Democratic-controlled Legislature that balanced worker protections with the operational realities of small employers,” Emigholz said. “This legislation would undo that balance and remove the flexibility that small businesses need to survive.”
When one employee in a 15-person business takes paid family leave, it means 7% of a small business’ workforce is gone for 12 weeks, Emigholz noted. Unlike a larger firm that can more easily shift responsibilities among many workers, a small firm may need to hire and train a replacement worker to keep the business running.
New Jersey is one of only 15 states in the nation to offer paid family leave and one of only 11 that requires employers to give workers their same jobs back after being gone on a paid 12-week leave, Emigholz said. Expanding the law to affect even more employers would make New Jersey even more of an outlier than it already is and underscore an anti-business reputation.
Originally, the legislation had sought to lower the Family Leave job protection threshold from 30 employees to five, but after strong opposition from NJBIA and the business community, the Senate amended bill to change the threshold to 15.
“While a threshold of 15 employees is better than five, 15 still sweeps up too many small businesses that will have to comply with this onerous new mandate,” Emigholz said.
