Starting with his first job at age 16, Bill Thompson has spent most of his working life earning minimum wage at fast-food restaurants in Missouri. For more than 30 years, he worked without any access to paid sick days or paid time off to care for a family member.
Through that time, Thompson, now 53, married and raised two children while also battling a long-term dental disease, unable to take care of his teeth because he lacked dental insurance and couldn’t afford to take unpaid leave to go to a free or low-cost clinic. In 2019, he took about 8 weeks of unpaid leave from his job at Burger King to care for his mother as she was dying of liver cancer, and he had to rely on food pantries and help from neighbors to make ends meet.
Now, Thompson is part of a group fighting for a Missouri ballot initiative that would guarantee paid sick days to all workers and raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. Voters in the state will weigh in on this measure this November, and it’s among the latest in a slew of worker-led initiatives that have made it to state ballots, and often passed, in the face of federal inaction on pro-worker issues.
“We don't need to be treated like this. We earned better than this,” Thompson said. “Not when the CEOs of Burger King and McDonald's, I mean, they make $10,000 an hour*… I brought home [a little over] $21,000 last year … I think everybody can do math … That's not enough to live on.”
Along with Nebraska and Alaska, Missouri is one of three states where voters this fall may approve paid sick day policies. (Like Missouri’s, the Alaska initiative would also "gradually" increase the minimum wage to $15.) If their initiatives pass, the states would join 14 others and Washington, D.C., in guaranteeing sick days to workers.
The benefits of these laws vary by state, but generally they require that employees be paid and their jobs be held for them when they take sick days, including to care for a family member, and that their employers can’t retaliate against them for doing so. Thirteen of those states and D.C. go further and also require employers to provide paid or longer periods of paid family and medical leave, building on the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 that requires most employers to provide for longer-term (but not paid) leaves, like parental leave after the birth of a child or medical leave due to a serious illness.
The United States is alone among its peer countries in not guaranteeing workers paid sick time or family and medical leave. While some employers provide paid time off as a benefit, they are not legally required to do so, and nearly a quarter of the American workforce doesn’t have access to a single paid sick day, while a majority don’t have access to paid family and medical leave — with low-income workers being disproportionately affected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal law required employers to provide up to 80 hours of paid leave for workers who were sick, quarantined or caring for a family member because of the virus, but that provision expired in December of 2020 — and Democratic efforts to extend it faltered.
While the pandemic shed light on the need for paid leave for workers, especially those deemed essential in industries like meatpacking and food services, the push to expand requirements for paid sick time existed before. “I think even before COVID, everybody's had that experience where your kids are back in school and the phone rings, and they have a fever and they need to come home immediately,” said Jill Heggen, communications director of the Women’s Fund for Omaha, which is organizing for the Nebraska initiative. “And you're shuffling the rest of your schedule.”
Advocates have fought for paid leave for decades, but they’ve had more luck at the state level than at the federal level. Connecticut’s sick-day law is the oldest, passed in 2011, and three state laws since then have been mandated by ballot measures like those coming before voters this year. Meanwhile, California’s is the oldest paid family leave law, passed in 2002. Policies to guarantee paid sick leave and paid medical and family leave to workers have long received strong bipartisan support among Americans, and all three of this year’s ballot initiatives also look to have support from voters — and even some businesses.
Voters’ deep concerns about living costs and the economy may have played a role in the grassroots push for paid leave measures this fall. On its face, that may seem to align supporters of paid leave initiatives more with Harris than Trump: While Harris has not explicitly addressed paid sick leave on the campaign trail this year, she has placed paid family and medical leave, a widely popular policy, at the center of her message on the economy — an issue most Americans still tend to give Republicans and Trump better marks on. She has also championed increased minimum wages, and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, signed paid sick and family leave policies into law in Minnesota.
But this alignment doesn’t necessarily mean that support for pro-worker ballot initiatives in November will boost Harris, or vice versa. In fact, separation from typical partisan messaging may be one reason that voters in recent years have a pattern of passing ballot initiatives in favor of more liberal policies, including increasing the minimum wage and paid sick leave, while still voting for more conservative candidates who may be less likely to support those policies.
In addition, while the economy has ranked as the top issue on voters’ minds throughout the election season, what that means to voters has varied widely over time, and paid leave may not be seen as a top economic issue for many, compared to issues like cost of living and inflation rates. Instead, paid family and medical leave is often still considered a women’s issue, and while it has been a central tenet of the Democratic policy platform, and a proposal put forth repeatedly by President Biden, it was also among the policies that Democrats put aside in favor of other priorities during Biden’s presidency.
Meanwhile, policies like paid sick days and raising the minimum wage are typically seen as labor issues – an area that’s gotten a bit murky when it comes to partisan lines and messaging.
Despite historic support for Democrats, many rank-and-file union members have trended toward Trump in recent years. And it’s a demographic his campaign has actively tried to court this year, pitching itself as the worker-friendly ticket and inviting Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters, to speak at the Republican National Convention. The union declined to endorse either Harris or Trump this year, its first time not endorsing the Democratic presidential nominee since 1996 — though most unions have backed Harris, and union leaders have decried Trump’s first-term record on union and labor policies, such as his move to weaken an Obama-era rule that would have expanded overtime pay.
This year, Trump seemed to back down from earlier suggestions that he would support increasing the minimum wage. And though Trump signed the law temporarily mandating paid sick days at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, his policy proposals around labor on the campaign trail have largely focused on tax proposals (which have drawn harsh criticism from economists), including ending taxes on tips — a policy also supported by Harris — and ending taxes on overtime pay. Meanwhile, Harris and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, have both argued for an increased child tax credit in the face of mounting bipartisan support for policies to ease financial burdens on working families.
Regardless of what happens at the top of the ticket, paid sick leave and related initiatives have strong popular support, and could make a big difference for workers. And whatever happens in November, states are likely to continue slowly making headway on enacting these policies. Thompson, whose current job at a hotel and convention center does provide sick days, is still motivated to fight for the initiative. He compared the mindset of those involved in today’s movement to that of civil rights activists in the 1960s: “They were taught to fight until we win,” he said. “And that's what I pledged to do when I joined the Fight for $15 back in 2016 … and [we’ve had] successes across the country.”
* Reporting shows that the CEO of McDonald’s made a $19.2 million salary in 2023, and the CEO of the parent company of Burger King was paid $117 million in stock and option awards in 2022.