With the start of the school year comes the dreaded return of cold and flu season. If you’re anticipating a lot of employees calling out sick, keep in mind they may not simply be taking paid sick days for themselves: Recent research indicates US workers use this benefit to take care of their children, as well.
A working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July found that after states passed mandates requiring employers to grant workers paid sick leave, the time US parents spent providing childcare increased by nearly 5%. The findings indicate employees are using paid sick leave to not only take care of themselves, but also their family members, Catherine Maclean, a health and labor economist at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, who co-authored the research, told HR Brew.
Despite the fact that paid sick leave has allowed workers to spend more time with their children, separate research shows these benefits don’t impose a significant cost on employers, Maclean added, suggesting they’re good for both businesses and their workforces.
Paid sick leave spurs uptick in childcare. Currently, the US has no federal paid sick leave policy, but a number of states added or expanded such requirements following the Covid-19 pandemic. At the beginning of 2024, 18 states and the District of Columbia had paid sick leave laws on the books, with legislation in Illinois, California, and Minnesota taking effect this year.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s American Time Use Survey (ATUS), Maclean and her research partner analyzed time use among employees in states that adopted paid sick leave mandates by October 2023, and found the laws led men and women to spend an average of 3.8 additional minutes on “primary childcare” each day, representing an increase of 4.9%. Activities like reading to children or physically caring for them are considered primary childcare under the ATUS.
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The time parents spent simply in the presence of their children (i.e. “face time”) increased by 10.5 minutes, on average, in the wake of paid sick leave laws, the study found.
A win-win. Current state laws stipulate that paid sick leave can be used to cover the employee themselves or time spent caring for a family member, Maclean noted. And separate research has documented similar effects among workers with older parents, finding access to paid family and paid sick leave benefits allows these employees to spend more time caring for them.
Taken together, the findings suggest these leave benefits “allow working families to balance these multiple responsibilities that they have,” she said, and remove “some of the stress about having these competing interests that they must attend to.”
While HR leaders may worry that offering paid sick leave may become costly or burdensome, the research doesn’t bear this out, Maclean said. Employees often don’t use up all their sick days, and state paid sick leave mandates only raise costs for businesses by 5.8 cents per employee-hour worked, a separate paper authored by Maclean found.
Overall, the evidence suggests “these policies are working in the favor of both employers and employees,” Maclean said of paid sick leave laws. “We’re seeing parents who are better able to balance their dual roles…that might lead to some increases in productivity down the way, or just a more well-balanced, higher quality of life situation for employees.”