Paid Leave For All Begins January 1, 2024
Starting January 1, 2024, the Paid Leave for All Workers Act is in effect, covering all Illinois employers. Check out the video for essential information about this new law!
Related Links:
ICS Paid Leave for All article
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Chicago Ordinance (good through 12/31/2023, new ordinance coming on 1/1/2024)
Transcript:
As we’ve been telling you for a number of months now, with the new addition of the Illinois-passed legislation called Paid Leave for All Workers Act, all employees in Illinois now will be covered in one form or another by ordinances or state law that requires employers to provide paid leave for them. Now we get a number of questions about what are the specifics, I’m going to cover some geographic exceptions for those in the city of Chicago, and those outside of the city of Chicago, but inside of Cook County, there are some small exceptions, and I’ll talk about those at the end.
First of all, this is super important. There is no minimum number of employees that this begins to trigger. Instead, it actually applies to all employees are all employees, all employers, even if you only have one employee, this law is going to apply to you. So don’t think that just because you’re smaller, you’re not going to have to do this. We want to make sure that all of our doctors know that this applies to you if you have even a single employee.
What are some of the requirements? First of all, it requires a minimum of 40 hours of paid leave assuming that the accrual process reaches that 40 hours. So up to or pardon me a minimum of 40 hours. So if you currently provide more than 40 hours of paid leave to your employees, then you have already met that requirement. How does the accrual work? In other words, how do they earn those particular hours? Now, you could choose just to give them all 40 hours up front. But the state does require a specific accrual or earning process. And the way it works is, for every 40 hours that an employee works, they earn one hour of paid leave. So in essence, when a full-time 40-hour week, employee works for 40 weeks, they will have earned all of their minimum number of hours. Now again, much like when I said if you gave more, that’s okay, that’s good. Keep your current policy. In this case, if your accrual process or your earnings requirements are better than what the state requires, then you can keep those policies in place as well. If they are less than in other words, currently, if you indicate that it requires 50 hours of work before they earn one hour, then you would have to change your policy to meet the state requirement, which is one hour for every 40 hours worked. Now, this also applies to part-time employees, so it’s full-time and part-time. So if you have a part-time employee, that’s only putting in 10 hours a week, in that particular case, then it’s going to take them four weeks to earn one hour because that’s when they will have it 10 hours a week or four weeks is 40 hours. At that point, then they will have earned one hour of vacation leave.
Last is one of the key questions that we get a lot. And that is now what if my employees really don’t want their paid leave? You are not allowed to ask your employees or they’re not allowed to come to you and say that they want to waive their right to paid leave. It’s specifically carved out in statute. That prevents some employers from manipulating their employees or persuading their employees to sign a waiver in these cases, the state considered that and actually specifically said no, you cannot do that. Now there are quite a few other provisions and probably a number of questions that you may have about this, and I would encourage you to jump out and read our full article on this. You can read it at ilchiro.org/leave That’s ilchiro.org/leave and you can find out all of the nuances but know that you do have to implement this policy it does apply to you if you are an employer even have one employee even if that person is part-time it applies to you. Go check it out and modify your policies to fit.
Now I mentioned earlier, some minor exceptions to to the city of Chicago and Cook County, you’re going to want to review those specific ordinances. So Cook County has a paid leave for workers ordinance it’s actually accrual is a bit faster. In other words, they only work 35 hours to earn one. They also have other provisions. And the city of Chicago’s ordinance actually overrides the state law. So you’re going to want to pay close attention to the city of Chicago’s ordinance and make sure that you implement that make sure that your policies adhere to that. I will tell you that although they’ve had one in place, and there’s one in place right now, another new ordinance begins on January 1 of 2024 that they just passed in early November. So we have more information in that same article at ilchiro.org/leave.
Now if you’re outside of the city of Chicago and still inside of Cook County, Cook County has an ordinance that provides paid sick leave. And it also overrides state statute as long as you’re not in a municipality that has decided to opt out of that county ordinance. So you need to review and look at your local municipality and find out if they’ve opted out of the Cook County paid sick leave policy otherwise, the Cook County paid leave policy will apply to you if you’re inside of Cook County and outside of the city of Chicago. In those cases, then it also overrides state law and you will only have to adhere to that Cook County paid sick leave policy. So, hopefully, this information helps you out but know that if you’re an employer, it begins on January 1 if it hasn’t already begun because Cook County has been in place since 2017, and Chicago has been around for a long time and changes yet again on January 1. It applies to you. Make sure you check it out, get ready change your policies, and we’ll catch you next week.
