Employees of Connecticut companies and nonprofits can now submit applications for the state”™s updated paid leave program, with benefits scheduled to become available in January.
The program was signed into law in 2019 and is financed by the qualified employees working in the state.
“As we all know, we all started having that half a percent taken out of our paychecks and contributed to the pay leave trust fund, which has about $301 million as of today,” said Connecticut Paid Leave Authority Andrea Barton Reeves in a recent Women”™s Business Development Corp. webinar.
The program covers employers who have one or more employees within the state, and these can include nonprofits and private sector companies with unionized workforces.
“If you’re a sole proprietor or a self-employed individual, you may also participate in the program by choosing to opt in,” Reeves said, adding that these employers would need to remain in the program for three years to ensure coverage. “If you’re a sole proprietor and you choose not to opt in and you have employees to whom you issue a W2, they must contribute even though you’re a sole proprietor.”
Reeves noted that federal government employees, some employees of the state government, municipalities and local or regional boards of election are not eligible for the program, nor employees of non-public elementary or secondary schools and parochial schools. Non-unionized state employees are covered.
“There are some other entities that are also exempt for a number of reasons ”“ that includes those that work in interstate commerce, those who are employed by governments of other states and spouses of active military members who are continuing to pay taxes in their home state instead of where they’re deployed, which in this case would be Connecticut,” she said.
The program is an expansion of the Connecticut Family Medical Leave Act, which was previously limited to employers with a workforce of 75 people or more. Under that version of the program, a qualified employee had to work for their employer for 12 months and 1,000 hours to qualify. It also came with caveats that required some employees to waive their accrued time off before qualifying for a leave.
Starting in January, the program”™s previous requirement of qualifying based on hours worked is gone and the ability to resume one”™s job after taking leave is guaranteed for those who”™ve worked for at least three months with their employer.
Rather than getting 16 weeks in a 24-month period, you’ll get 12 weeks in a 12-month period,” Reeve said, adding that while “an employer can still require an employee to use their accrued time, they can no longer require them to exhaust it.”
The leave period can also be adjusted to meet one”™s needs, Reeves stated, with options including a single block of time or a reduced schedule leave that reduces one”™s weekly hours in order to attend to the issues requiring the leave.
“We have what’s known as intermittent leave, where we take leave in separate non-consecutive periods of time instead of taking a block or a schedule,” she said. “This often happens when you need to have recurring treatment or you’re taking someone to recurrent treatment, or if there’s a chronic health condition like migraines or colitis and the symptoms of those conditions can be unpredictable.”
Reeves identified Aflac as the program”™s claims administration partner, and that company receives the submitted documentation to determine eligibility and calculate the benefit amount.
“If you are making at or below minimum wage, you get 95% of your base weekly earnings,” she said. “If you earn more than that, it’s a slightly more complex calculation. But everyone gets, no matter what they make, a maximum cap of one-third of 60 times the minimum wage ”“ right now, no one can get more than $780 a week.”
Reeves recommended visiting the CTPaidLeave.org website for in-depth information on the program”™s eligibility requirements and benefits, admitting that her agency is “not sending employees communication about paid leave directly.”
