SAN ANTONIO – In a long-expected move, state lawmakers are considering a bill to block Texas cities from attempting to institute local, paid sick leave ordinances.
Cities like Austin and San Antonio have already been stymied in the court system for ordinances they attempted to put in place that would require employers provide paid sick leave for their workers - something opponents said ran afoul of the state’s minimum wage law.
Now, in a move on the legislative front that at least one San Antonio councilman predicted in 2018, Republican lawmakers are poised to pass a bill that would explicitly prohibit cities or counties from adopting or enforcing any kind of ordinance or regulation regarding employment benefits or leave that exceeds what federal or state law allows.
The bill would effectively ensure any changes to paid sick leave requirements would have to happen at one of those levels.
The Texas Senate has already passed Senate Bill 14 along party lines, and the House is scheduled to take it up on Wednesday.
San Antonio’s “sick and safe leave” ordinance is already effectively dead after setbacks in the courts, and one of the groups that opposed it, the Association of Convenience Store Retailers, is supportive of SB 14.
The group’s president, Anwar Tahir, said he has stores in three different Bexar County cities, and he does not want to have to follow different rules for each of them.
“It’s better to have one universal law for all over the state of Texas so that that way we can follow those labor laws,” Tahir told KSAT.
Activists haven’t given up on their attempts to ensure paid sick leave for Texas workers, though.
Joleen Garcia, a community organizer for economic justice with the Texas Organizing Project, which played a big part in the creation of San Antonio’s ordinance, acknowledged that getting a paid sick leave law passed through a Republican-controlled state government was unlikely.
However, she turned that into a rallying call for the 2022 elections.
“Do we want folks in the state legislature that are going to fight for working families to have these rights, to have the right to paid sick leave, or do we want more of the same?” Garcia said.
SAN ANTONIO “SICK AND SAFE” LEAVE HISTORY
Activists pushed paid sick leave to the forefront in San Antonio in 2018 with a petition drive. The city council opted to take up the issue and passed an ordinance in August 2018 that required employers to provide workers with one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked.
In the face of a lawsuit, though, the city delayed the implementation of the ordinance from August 2019 until December 2019, a move decried by activists. The city council passed an amended ordinance in October 2019 called “safe and sick leave,” though it didn’t succeed in appeasing local business groups.
In November 2019, a district judge in Bexar County blocked San Antonio’s ordinance from taking effect with a temporary injunction, pending a full trial. The city’s efforts to get that injunction overturned failed, with an appeals court calling the ordinance unconstitutional in March.
Though the case could technically still move forward, City of San Antonio spokeswoman Laura Mayes told KSAT the city was not pursuing its legal fight any further.
“Since the courts have ruled, we don’t have a paid sick leave ordinance in place,” Mayes said.
A similar policy in Austin also hit a legal wall in June 2020 when the Texas Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a lower court’s ruling that the capital city’s ordinance was unconstitutional.