For Immediate Release
Washington, DC – The following statement should be attributed to Annette Guarisco Fildes, president and CEO, The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC):
“Companies that employ tens of thousands of workers in states across the country need consistent rules regarding employee benefits and compensation arrangements. Benefits and compensation include everything from wages to employer-sponsored healthcare and retirement plans and compensatory time off, including paid sick, paid parental and paid vacation leave. Employers are dedicated to offering their employees competitive benefits and compensation packages as they help to attract and retain top talent while ensuring a happy, healthy workforce. In order to effectively craft employee benefits and compensation packages, flexibility is key. Employers must be able to customize their offerings to suit their workforce, without overly prescriptive government mandates.
State and local mandates on compensation impose significant and costly compliance burdens on employers, especially those with workers in many states. Resources spent on state-by-state compliance take away resources available to provide employee compensation and benefits.
Rather than impose additional layers of regulation and costly complexity on companies that are already offering generous paid leave to their workforce, legislators should instead exempt employers from additional regulation if they offer more paid leave days/hours than is required by the law. This approach gets to the heart of the concern that workers in the state are not provided a certain amount of paid leave.
We applaud the efforts to craft sensible paid leave laws that do not adversely impact the employers already offering more generous paid leave benefits to their employees. We encourage policymakers to allow large employers that provide more generous paid leave benefits to use the notice, tracking, reporting, accrual, cap, carryover and other policies they believe best suits their workforce and not add unnecessary compliance burdens.”