In 2016, Arizona voters passed a landmark paid sick leave law, which was a significant step forward for workers’ rights in the state. We played a leading role in working with Arizona partners to develop and draft Arizona’s Fair Wages and Healthy Families Act, which ultimately created vital protections for workers throughout the state by guaranteeing workers the right to accrue and use paid sick leave for their own health needs, family health needs, or other caregiving and safety-related needs.
Our work on paid sick time in the state continues, as we recently jointly filed an amicus brief alongside our partners at NELP in the Arizona Court of Appeals to support Tiffany Beales, who worked for BTS Event Management LLC, a wedding and event planning services company based in Arizona.
After her employer failed to notify her that she had accrued and was entitled to sick time, and then didn’t pay her the earned sick time she was owed under the state’s law, Tiffany exercised her rights and brought suit against her employer in court. Although the trial court found that Tiffany’s employer had failed to pay her earned sick time in accordance with the law, the court did not award her the additional damages the state’s law requires employers to pay when they violate a worker’s rights – a key part of making workers whole after they disrupt their lives to go through such a time-consuming, difficult legal process.
The additional penalties Tiffany’s owed are critical to effective enforcement of the law: on top of preventing workers from taking a financial hit when they assert their legal rights, these penalties also send an important message and deter employers from violating the law.
Access to paid sick time is critical to protecting workers’ health and economic security, as well as public health. We’re proud to have led the way in passing dozens of local and state paid sick time laws, which have made a difference in millions of workers’ lives by providing them with the right to stay home when they or a loved one are sick, without having to worry about taking a pay cut. However, passing these laws is only the first step of ensuring workers can actually exercise their hard-won rights, and sometimes we must step in to ensure courts are interpreting these laws in accordance with the intentions of the voters and legislators who enacted them.
The court’s decision weakened the very safeguards the law was designed to provide, and so we stepped in to support Tiffany on her appeal. We hope to see her granted the additional damages she is entitled to, and we won’t stop fighting to vindicate workers’ rights under the critical workplace policies we pass.