Paid Sick Leave: What the Crew Accrues

This is the exclusion most likely to matter on a union job, and it is the reason a signatory contractor may see no sick-leave line at all. Note what it is NOT: a handshake, a project agreement, or an employer's own policy. It takes a valid CBA carrying the listed terms.

The wage floor is what keeps the exclusion from becoming a way to buy out of the statute cheaply. An agreement can only trade away paid sick leave if it is paying well above minimum in the first place.

A waiver has to be visible. Requiring the agreement to say so in clear and unambiguous terms stops the exclusion from being inferred from silence, which is how a crew would otherwise lose the benefit without anyone deciding that they should.

This list is wider than most employers expect, and wider than the family-leave lists they may already know. Grandparents, grandchildren and siblings are all in it, and none of them requires the employee to be a caregiver of record.

This is the provision that covers the people a family list never reaches — a partner who is not a spouse, a close friend, a chosen family member. The employer's only lever is the one-per-year limit, not approval of who is named.

The threshold is deliberately low. Thirty days is short enough that most of a crew clears it, including seasonal and part-time workers, so the default assumption on a job should be that the rule applies rather than that it does not.

Accrual starts on day one even though use does not. That gap is the source of most confusion here: the balance is building from the first hour worked, and the 90-day rule governs only when it can be spent.

The statute lets an employer design its own schedule but not its own outcome. Both benchmarks have to be met, so an accrual method that is generous early and stalls later fails at the 200-day check even though it passed at 120.

This is the front-loading route: grant the leave up front and skip accrual arithmetic entirely. It is the simplest option to administer, which is why many contractors choose it, and its benchmarks are stated in days OR hours rather than hours alone.

One waiting period, at the start of employment, and never again. It does not reset each year, and it does not restart when the employee moves to a different crew or classification.

Carryover is the default, not a benefit an employer elects. The caps below are what bound the employer's exposure — not an annual wipe of the balance.

This caps what an employee may SPEND in a year. Read it alongside the accrual cap, because the two limit different things and an exam question usually turns on which one is being asked about.

This caps what an employee may BANK in total. Carryover is real, but it does not compound forever — the balance stops growing at the ceiling and resumes accruing once leave is used and the balance drops below it.

This is the trade the front-loading employer makes: grant the whole entitlement at the start of the year and the accrual and carryover machinery switches off. It is the cleanest compliance path for a contractor with turnover.

Sick leave is not vacation. Vacation is a vested wage that must be paid out at separation, and this is the rule that says paid sick leave is not — which is exactly why the two are worth keeping in separate buckets on the books.

The one-year rehire rule is what stops separation from being used to zero a balance. It matters especially in construction, where laying off between jobs and rehiring the same people is ordinary practice rather than an edge case.

The counterpart to the rehire rule: what was already paid for does not come back. This is where combined PTO policies get complicated, because paying out a combined balance at separation buys back the sick-leave portion too.

Salaried staff have no timecard to accrue against, so the statute supplies one. The exception matters for part-time salaried office staff, whose accrual tracks their actual normal week rather than a deemed full one.

The balance has to reach the employee every pay period, not on request. Either delivery route is acceptable, which matters for a contractor whose payroll service cannot add a line to the stub.

The choice of how much to use belongs to the employee, not the employer. The two-hour increment is the only lever the employer has, and it is a ceiling on that lever rather than a default entitlement to it.

Sick leave is paid on the ordinary payroll cycle, not held for verification or reconciliation. Delaying it to the cycle after next is a violation even where the leave itself was properly granted.

The employee's duty scales with what they could have known. It is a notice duty, not a permission duty — the two-tier standard tells a supervisor what to expect, not what to approve.

A contractor who already offers PTO does not have to bolt a second bucket onto it. The test is the outcome, not the label: the existing policy has to satisfy accrual, carryover AND use, and failing any one of the three brings the statute back.

An oral request is enough. There is no form to fill in and no doctor's note prerequisite in the statute, so a supervisor told 'my daughter is sick and I need the day' has received a valid request.

The second category of qualifying use, kept separate because its permitted purposes live in other statutes and have changed on their own timetable. What a contractor needs is that it exists and that the same request-and-no-retaliation rules apply.

Finding cover is the employer's job, not the sick employee's. This is aimed squarely at the informal practice of telling someone to sort out their own replacement, which functions as a denial of the leave without ever refusing it.

Note how far past 'using' the protection reaches: attempting, complaining, cooperating and opposing are all covered. An employer can comply perfectly with the accrual rules and still violate this section on the day someone asks a question about them.

The 30-day window shifts who has to explain. Inside it the employer must account for the timing, which is why a documented, dated reason for an adverse action is worth having before it is needed rather than after.

A right nobody has been told about is not much of a right, and the poster is how the notice reaches a crew that never reads a handbook. All four contents are required — an employer who posts entitlement but omits the retaliation line has not complied.

A small penalty attached to a cheap duty. Its real significance is evidentiary rather than financial: an employer with no poster has a harder time arguing that an employee's failure to follow a procedure was the employee's fault.

The accrual rule is only enforceable if somebody kept count. Three years also outlasts most of the jobs a record would relate to, so the duty survives the project it came from.

This is what makes the record duty bite. Missing records do not create a factual dispute to be argued — they hand the employee the maximum balance, and clear and convincing evidence is a hard standard to meet from an empty file.

The employee's reason is their own. This protects the employer as much as the employee: a contractor who does not collect medical details cannot mishandle them, and asking for them invites a separate set of problems.

Trebling with a floor means the penalty does not scale down to nothing on a small claim. A half-day of withheld leave is worth far more than a half-day of wages once the floor applies.

This one runs per person per day, so it grows with how long a bad policy stays in place rather than with the size of any single claim. A written policy that violates the article exposes the employer once for every worker it covers.

The statute distinguishes a mistake from a practice. The words doing the work are 'isolated' and 'unintentional' — a recurring error is neither, and the safe harbor closes the second it becomes the way payroll normally runs.