Minnesota’s $1 Billion Paid Leave Tax

 

Minnesota’s $1 Billion Paid Leave Tax is a new bill that Minnesota is pushing for the most extreme paid leave mandate in the country (HF2/SF2) and ESA members like you need to way in! This mandate would require all employers, regardless of size, to allow all employees up to 24 weeks of paid leave funded by a $1 billion payroll tax!

 

Some 80 percent of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s members already offer paid family leave to employees. Yet Gov. Tim Walz and DFL legislators plan to impose a new $1 billion payroll tax on all employers and employees to underwrite a massive state leave program and bureaucracy that would annually benefit less than 7 percent of the state’s workforce, according to a 2019 legislative analysis.

 

No other state in the country comes close to such a mandate and this would be especially crippling for small and medium sized businesses. 

 

However, that isn’t all Minnesota is proposing. Through the “Earned Sick” bill (HF19/SF 34) employers would also be mandated to provided 2 weeks of paid sick leave as well.

 

That amounts to 6 months of paid leave for all employees in Minnesota.

 

Many employers are struggling as it is to find and hire great workers and these mandates could potentially hamstring them once they do as employees on leave are not replaceable. Employers would simply be paying employees on leave and continuing on, shorthanded, for months at a time.

 

Contact your legislators now and tell them how reckless this would be in the electronic security industry!