Joe Gross has spent more than $300,000 on sick pay since New York started mandating the benefit a little more than a year ago.
Cost is only part of the problem.
The founder of Gross Electric in Queensbury, the region’s largest electrical contracting firm, said the mandate also is promoting bad behavior. At his company, an average of 94 union electricians have been calling out sick every month since the law took effect. Prior to that, the average number calling out was fewer than 10.
With a payroll averaging about 250 employees working in the field, the spike in electricians calling out sick is creating chaos for Gross Electric schedulers, forcing them to juggle crews between hospitals, computer chip factories, farms and pharmaceutical plants.
“This is a nightmare when close to 80% of the people who call off sick are doing it on Mondays, Fridays and around the holidays,” Gross said. “We have never seen anything like this before. It is a safety issue and you can’t even measure how much this is costing us with the loss of productivity.”
The frustrating part for Gross and the owners of several other electrical contracting firms is that they have negotiated with the IBEW Local 236 electricians’ union for decades and the union has always taken a pass when offered a paid sick time policy, opting instead for a contract with higher hourly wages.
“This was a gift from the state,” said Stephen Chamberlain, executive director of the Albany chapter of National Electrical Contractors...
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