Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection launched a new compliance system Friday targeting businesses where workers rarely use their legally mandated sick time, signaling a potential crackdown on employers who may be illegally discouraging time off.
Under the new system, DCWP will flag any employer whose payroll records show fewer than 50% of employees used paid time off in the past year, according to DCWP policy director Elizabeth Wagoner. The agency considers such low usage rates a sign of “systemic” violations of the city’s Protected Time Off Law.
The 50% benchmark stems from the agency’s analysis of national data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that half of all private-sector employees with paid sick leave miss at least one work day annually due to illness, injury or disability, Wagoner said. The exact threshold varies by industry and company size.
The enforcement tool addresses a widespread compliance problem under New York’s paid time off law, which covers approximately 3 million workers citywide. Since 2014, most New York employees have been entitled to time off for illness, injury or urgent personal business. The recently renamed Protected Time Off Law grants private-sector workers a minimum of 32 hours of unpaid time off per year, plus 40 hours minimum of paid time off annually.
DCWP’s investigation revealed that employers often claim low usage rates simply reflect workers who don’t want to use their benefits. However, the agency found workers frequently face illegal barriers to accessing their guaranteed time off.
Common violations include employers failing to provide sufficient notice of workers’ rights, managers who discourage time off use, or requiring workers to find their own shift coverage before taking sick leave, according to the agency’s findings. All these practices violate city law.
“What we want to do here is provide clarity for everyone, for the judges who are hearing our cases, for employers who are running a business,” Wagoner said. “If you have sick time usage rates below this number, there’s a compliance problem, and you need to fix it.”
Labor experts praised the data-driven approach as a breakthrough in enforcement strategy.
“If you’re a company and you don’t even have half of your people taking one day off, from a common sense perspective, that seems like a pretty good indication that your workers genuinely are not getting sick leave,” said Terri Gerstein, director of NYU Wagner Labor Initiative. “I think it’s a very smart approach that allows them to have a rigorous data base to cut through some of those arguments.”
Some experts argue the city’s benchmark is actually conservative, given that New York’s protected time off law covers situations beyond health emergencies that national data doesn’t track. The local law includes absences for childcare and housing court hearings, according to Daniel Schneider, a Harvard Kennedy School sociologist who studies work schedule impacts on economic security.
The city began analyzing paid time off compliance rates about a year ago to identify potential law violations through employer payroll records, leading to Friday’s policy changes.
DCWP also unveiled a new “self-auditing” tool allowing employers to check their compliance with the law, including whether they meet the new usage rate benchmarks. The system will provide recommendations for achieving compliance, and employers’ data won’t be shared with the enforcement agency, Wagoner said.
The department will continue investigating violations based on worker complaints alongside the new payroll monitoring system.
Gerstein expressed optimism that the clear standards could improve employer cooperation with the law’s requirements, marking a significant shift in how the city enforces worker protections.
