Menin on earned safe and sick leave compliance warnings
Menin asks about compliance rates after DCWP issued warnings to 56,000 employers. Levine and Wagoner explain the goal was education, not investigating all businesses, and that there's no excuse for non-compliance.
Earned safe and sick leave time.
So I want to talk a little bit about that.
So DCWP issued compliance warnings to roughly 56,000 New York City employers following the implementation.
of the earn safe and sick time amendments.
What percentage of those employers have achieved compliance and what enforcement actions have been taken against those that have not?
Well, I appreciate the question.
We take a lot of pride in that warning blitz.
I'm going to turn things over to my colleague to share a little more.
But the goal of that was not to open investigations of all of those thousands of businesses.
It is twofold.
One, we wanted to make sure businesses understood their obligation.
I don't believe in gotcha enforcement.
I believe in making sure businesses understand their obligations, workers understand their rights.
That was the goal there.
But also we wanted to make sure businesses knew that we were watching, that given the high volume of complaints over the years we've gotten about PTO, I wanted businesses to know that we took violations really seriously.
That's why we followed up with warnings.
That's why we followed up with enforcement.
With respect to the number of in compliance, I don't think we've investigated every one of those businesses, but I'll turn things over to my deputy commissioner to share more.
No, that's echoing everything the commissioner said.
And to generate that list, you know, we're looking at all of the restaurants in the city, which obviously is information that DOHMH maintains.
And, you know, this historically can be a high violation industry.
And all of our past targets going back years and years and years, every company we've ever investigated in the past also got a letter like that.
And, you know, as we hear from workers, you know, as the year goes on, we'll be able to look and see.
see, you know, did this company get a notice of the new laws?
There's absolutely no excuse not to be in compliance with the law.