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LINCOLN — Nebraska employers will now be required to provide earned paid sick leave for eligible employees, through a ballot issue that passed Tuesday.
Advocates had estimated that 250,000 Nebraskans were working full-time without paid sick days, leaving them to face choices that included ignoring their illness and sending sick kids to school to avoid consequences such as missing a day’s pay.
However, passage of Initiative 436 means that eligible employees now will have the right to earn sick time for personal or family health needs. The issue had about 75 percent support about 11 p.m.
“It’s another example of Nebraskans supporting Nebraskans and workers in Nebraska having a better day,” one of the co-sponsors for the initiative, Craig Moody, said Tuesday night as the vote count poured in favoring paid sick leave.
Moody, who runs Verdis Group, a sustainability consulting firm based in Omaha, has said the ballot measure would provide a strong return on investment for Nebraska businesses.
Under the ballot initiative, employers with fewer than 20 employees must provide up to 40 hours (five days) of sick leave annually, and larger employers, with 20 or more employees, must provide up to 56 hours (seven days).
The driver of the effort, the Paid Sick Leave for Nebraskans group, said that paid sick leave was rarest in service industries (such as restaurants), construction, manufacturing, warehousing, retail, educational support and transportation.
The biggest resistance to paid sick leave came from some smaller businesses. Critics said it unnecessarily complicates an issue where responsible businesses can compete by offering benefits when they can’t compete as easily on pay.
The sick leave petition was the first of what ultimately became six ballot issues to qualify for the Nov. 5 ballot.
Organizers had announced in June that they turned in 138,000 signatures in support of the ballot measure. Election officials in August stopped counting after confirming 97,557 signatures — which was 11,000 more than the 86,500 needed for the 7% threshold statewide to change state law.
Nebraska also requires that its petition gatherers collect valid signatures from 5% of registered voters in at least 38 of the state’s 93 counties. The effort hit 5% or more in 47 counties, according to a release from the Secretary of State’s Office.
