Most employees in Connecticut will see a new, small deduction coming out of their first paycheck for 2021. The ongoing deduction of 0.5 percent is going to fund the state’s new paid leave program. As of 2022, when the paid leave trust fund is fully funded, people who have contributed will be eligible to take up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, at up to 95 percent of their wages.
CEO of the Paid Leave Authority, Andrea Barton Reeves says this change will affect even the smallest businesses with only one employee.
“There’s an entirely new world that small businesses have to navigate," she told Connecticut Public Radio's Where We Live. "The greatest concern we hear is -- if people are paid for their leave, they’ll probably take more advantage of it, and they’ll take it more frequently, and they’ll take it for longer periods of time. But the reality is that in other states -- we'll take Washington state as an example, that has a program that’s as close to ours as possible -- the statistics just simply don’t bear that out.”
Barton Reeves says for an employee making $40,000 a year, they will contribute about $200 over one year to the program. Connecticut is the seventh state to put such an initiative in place.
