MONTPELIER — Gov. Phil Scott quietly laid the framework to create a voluntary paid family leave program in the contract his administration negotiated with the state employees’ union this fall.
By including the program in the agreement with state workers, Scott is again offering a competing vision to the mandatory paid leave model Democratic lawmakers are expected to take up early next session.
However, for the governor’s program to be enacted, lawmakers would need to agree to fund it. Democratic leaders have opposed Scott’s proposal, preferring a mandatory paid leave program funded by a payroll tax.
Under Scott’s plan, Vermont’s 8,500 state employees would receive six weeks of paid leave, and form an insurance pool that other businesses and employees could join voluntarily.
Last year, lawmakers balked at the governor’s plan, and argued that if it isn’t a requirement for all employers and workers to pay into the paid leave program, it will see low participation rates.
But in 2020, the Scott administration is pitching the plan again, this time as part of the bargaining agreement reached with the Vermont State Employees’ Association, and hopes lawmakers will agree to fund it. Covering state employees under the program would cost the state $2.5 million.
Vermont Public Radio first reported on the union agreement this week.
“We’re just going to take this to the Legislature and make our case and hope that they are going to be supportive of the agreement that we struck with the VSEA,” Vermont’s Secretary of Administration Susanne Young said Friday.
The administration will start looking for an insurance company to administer the benefit in early 2020 and would hope to begin providing it in July 2020.
The program would give employees six weeks of paid leave per year, and it would cost employees or employers about $300 to participate annually.
Steve Howard, the president of VSEA said that as part of the agreement, there is nothing that requires lawmakers to enact the governor’s plan.
If Scott’s paid leave plan doesn’t take effect, the agreement says employees will receive a 0.25% wage increase, Howard said.
Last year, the VSEA backed the Democrats’ paid family leave proposal over the governor’s. Howard said that although the Scott administration’s plan was included in this year’s contract, the union will still support the Democratic approach moving forward.
“We support as much family leave as we can possibly get for as many Vermonters as possible,” Howard said. “We’re going to support what’s in the agreement, but we’re also going to support the broader approach that we’ve always supported.”
The governor’s paid leave plan was first pitched as a two-state program with New Hampshire and came months after he vetoed a paid leave bill pushed by Democrats that was funded by a mandatory payroll tax.
Scott unveiled the proposal with the Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, in January.
Sununu signaled this fall that he was distancing himself from the two-state program. The plan outlined in the bargaining agreement would only include Vermont.
Democratic legislators took testimony on the Scott administration’s paid leave program last year but never supported the idea of a voluntary paid leave system.
In 2019, Democrats couldn’t agree on a paid leave policy. The House passed a robust paid leave program that would have cost employers and or employees about $80 million in an annual payroll tax. The Senate moved to scale down the program. Disagreements over paid leave and increasing the minimum wage led the House to adjourn before final deals could be struck on either policy.
But the paid leave program that ultimately passed the Senate last year would be funded by a $29 million payroll tax that could be paid by workers or employers and would be eligible to all employees in the state.
House leaders say they can support the bill now, because senators, who had stripped out a provision allowing employees to take paid leave time for personal injuries, added in a measure reinstating the insurance if they pay it voluntarily.
Top leaders in the House and Senate say they are poised to pass the minimum wage and paid family leave bills in the early weeks of the 2020 session.
Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, who chairs the House General and Military Affairs Committee, which wrote the paid leave bill in the lower chamber, said the governor’s decision to include his paid leave benefit in the union agreement won’t change Democrats’ plans for the policy in 2020.
“What the administration decides to do with any benefit it offers state employees is between the administration and the union,” Stevens said. “It doesn’t change our goal to provide a plan that benefits all working Vermonters.”