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100 Maine small businesses endorse proposal for paid family and medical leave

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100 Maine small businesses endorse proposal for paid family and medical leave

May 31, 2023 | 8:46 am ET
By Dan Neumann
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100 Maine small businesses endorse proposal for paid family and medical leave
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Birth Roots co-founder Leah Deragon speaks at a press conference outside Arabica Coffee in Portland. | Beacon

One hundred small business owners have signed onto a letter calling for the Maine State Legislature to pass a paid family and medical leave policy that they say would help them retain workers and compete with larger companies.

“As a small business owner, I value my employees and I try to support them when they need extended time off for childbirth, serious medical reasons, or to care for a family member — but the only support I can offer is scheduling flexibility,” Catherine Rasco, the owner of Arabica Coffee in Portland, said at a press conference outside of her cafe on Tuesday morning. 

“In my industry, where corporate coffee chains offer employment that includes valuable benefits like paid family leave and dental insurance, a state paid leave program will help small, local coffee shops like mine compete with corporate coffee chains for employees,” she added.

Last week, after having studied the issue for years and consulting with workers and over 300 business owners, Maine lawmakers unveiled a proposal to create a paid family and medical leave program in which most Maine workers could take a combination of medical leave and family leave that adds up to 12 weeks of paid leave each year.

The bill, LD 1964, sponsored by Assistant Senate Majority Leader Mattie Daughtry (D-Cumberland) and Assistant House Majority Leader Kristen Cloutier (D-Lewiston), is a top priority of progressive groups, workers around the state and legislative Democrats. As such, the measure is being co-sponsored by 100 lawmakers, most of them Democrats. 

100 Maine small businesses endorse proposal for paid family and medical leave
Arabica Coffee owner Catherine Rasco speaks on Tuesday. | Beacon

The state’s largest business lobbies, including the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Retail Association of Maine, have come out against the bill, describing it as an “unworkable” mandate on businesses.

Selecca Bulgar-Medina, director of the Maine Small Business Coalition — which represents over 4,000 small business owners in the state and is a project of the Maine People’s Alliance (of which Beacon is a project) — said she collected the signatures to show that the corporate lobby groups do not represent the views of all small business owners. 

“The reality is that people need major surgeries, have babies or need to care for aging parents,” she said during the press conference. “But right now, without paid leave, small businesses are losing valued employees. And in some cases, people are leaving the workforce or shuttering their businesses permanently.”

Her point was echoed by Leopold Ndayisabye, the owner of OneLove HomeCare in Scarborough, an agency that provides home support services to people with developmental disabilities and autism.

He said that paid leave would help retain staff in an industry where retention of qualified employees has reached a crisis level, given that the average wage for direct care workers is so low. 

“A statewide paid leave program will help make small businesses more competitive for qualified applicants,” Ndayisabye said.

The bill proposes that employers and workers split the cost of paying into the fund to maintain the program. However, businesses with fewer than 15 employees wouldn’t be required to pay into the fund. Instead, workers at those businesses would simply contribute their half. 

Despite the extensive feedback from small business owners that Daughtry and Cloutier say informed the drafting of their bill, Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, has called for a number of significant changes that would reduce the scope of the bill and its utility for workers.

During the public hearing last week, the Mills administration floated a potential wage replacement rate of 66% when someone takes leave, significantly lower than the 90% of wages proposed by the bill. The administration also suggested reducing the amount of time a person could take off to six weeks.

Leah Deragon, the co-founder of Birth Roots in Portland, which helps new families access support resources, said it would be a mistake to water down the proposal.

“A smaller paid leave benefit of 66% at six weeks is not going to be the safety net that we need it to be,” she said at the press conference. 

Deragon went on to explain that the maternal mortality rate is getting worse in the U.S. and states that fail to enact policies that protect families will fall behind those that do. 

“I personally have sat with families for over 5,000 hours listening to them make sense of the task of being a new family in the United States with the amounts of protections and support that they don’t have,” she said. “I can tell you the number one stressor is the idea of having to return to work far before they or their babies are ready.”

If LD 1964 is significantly scaled back in the legislature, a coalition of advocacy groups, including the Maine People’s Alliance, may decide to take the issue to ballot. The groups have collected enough signatures to trigger a 2024 ballot referendum on whether to create a paid leave policy.