A temp worker told the St. Paul City Council that after 10 years with the same St. Paul staffing agency, he still doesn’t receive paid sick leave, even though the benefit is mandated by the city. A McDonald’s worker said her employer never informed her that paid sick leave was an option. And city staffers who enforce the rules say that while local businesses are quick to comply when they’re called out, larger employers such as chain stores have dragged their feet even after being contacted.
The problem, say critics, comes down to manpower. At St. Paul City Hall, almost everyone agrees that having two employees dedicated to education and enforcement of a growing number of labor standards is insufficient. The city’s paid sick leave mandate went into effect in the summer of 2017, and the first phase of a gradual $15 minimum wage rollout begins in January.
“You have to be in some kind of incredible denial to think that two staff members are going to be enough,” said City Council Member Jane Prince, addressing her colleagues Wednesday.
Nevertheless, Prince and most other council members voted against a proposal from Council Member Rebecca Noecker mandating that those staffing levels double. The Noecker amendment would have required that there be at least four workers within the city’s proposed new Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and Education, but council members called city ordinances the wrong approach to achieve the desired staffing.
The division, which the council is poised to create by city ordinance later this month, would be housed within the Department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity, which has one full-time employee dedicated to investigating earned sick and safe time complaints. Another investigator is working on an education strategy for the minimum wage mandate.
“This is how we are going to make sure we’re holding everyone accountable and make sure they understand what their rights are,” said Noecker, who presented a mandated staffing level as an amendment to the Division of Labor Standards ordinance.
“I think this is good, but I don’t think this is the best we can (do),” Noecker said. “We are now considering adequate to be … two people for the entire city, and the same person who is doing education is doing enforcement, which is exactly what we did not want to happen.”
After calling mandated staffing levels rare and possibly unprecedented in modern city ordinances, council members heard from an assistant city attorney, who told them that the amendment would probably not be legally binding. Even a sudden resignation would leave the city out of compliance with its own law.
“This is tough,” said Council Member Mitra Nelson. “Our attorney just said it is questionable whether this is enforceable. I want to enforce this with money we fight for in the budget, not with a symbolic statement.”
Chris Tolbert, a key architect of the city’s $15 minimum wage mandate, agreed. “If we want to make a statement, (pass a) resolution,” he said.
Dai Thao voted in favor of the Noecker amendment.
“We have to provide them the tools and resources to get to that place, on both sides of the issue — the employer and the employee,” Thao said. “I don’t want us to be in a place in the future where we say ‘we could have done something right. We could have given them the baseline support.'”
The final vote was 5-2, with Council President Amy Brendmoen, Kassim Busuri, Tolbert, Nelson and Prince voting against the amendment, and Noecker and Thao supporting it.
CTUL, a labor advocacy center that organizes fast food, construction and janitorial workers, issued a statement Wednesday asking the city to hire four staffers for the division and earmark $400,000 to contract with community groups to assist with education and outreach.
The statement said “employers have been able to violate the law with few consequences. (Our center) has filed 17 complaints of labor rights violations in the last year. All are still open, in part due to a lack of resources.”
The full ordinance that will create the new labor standards division is scheduled to be voted on Aug. 14.