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Council: paid sick leave for workers, ending tax avoidance for wealthy non-profits
Council members propose paid sick leave for low-income workers and an end to tax avoidance by wealthy non-profits.
Council: paid sick leave for workers, ending tax avoidance for wealthy non-profits
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Workers and labor advocates flanked City Council President Darrell Clarke and Councilman Bill Greenlee this morning to support a bill mandating paid-sick leave for workers. Greenlee thinks he has better odds than in 2011, when Mayor Michael Nutter vetoed legislation passed by council.
A representative of Comcast, who has clocked serious time lobbying against the bill, was spotted at the press conference. Greenlee says that he is willing to dialog with business leaders, who contend that the bill will drive up costs.
"But one thing we're not going to do is not do this bill," he said.
Joe Grace, the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce's new director of public policy, says that the business lobby wants Council to make the sick leave optional and set up incentives, perhaps of the tax variety, to encourage businesses to participate.
Greenlee and other advocates frame paid sick leave not only as a question of worker rights, but as a matter of public health.
"What is ironic about this situation is that the workers who have the most contact with the public are the ones who don't have paid sick leave."
One sign read "Burgers, Fries and a Cold? Pass Earned Sick Leave!"
According to Greenlee, approximately two out of five workers in Philadelphia do not have paid sick leave, including 36,300 restaurant workers and 38,600 health-care workers.
One young man named Calvin told the press that he was treated poorly after illness kept him off the job.
"I was ostracized and told I wasn't 'pulling my weight,'" he said.
San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut all mandate some sort of paid sick leave for workers. Last year, The New York Times editorialized that "there is little evidence that sick-leave requirements have hurt job markets elsewhere."
Meanwhile! Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds-Brown is, perhaps as we speak, introducing a resolution to hold Council hearings on the enormous tax breaks given to nonprofits, sometimes very wealthy ones, who hold sometimes very questionably tax-exempt property.
Reynolds-Brown cites an Inquirer/Plan Philly study that found that 41,074 city properties are tax except, representing $528 million in property tax revenue lost.
Last year, City Paper reported that even as Philadelphia home owners faced yet another tax increases, "wealthy nonprofits like the University of Pennsylvania will pay somewhere between little and nothing to the city this year ― and Nutter, despite Philly’s desperate financial straits, seems content to let them do so. Many universities contribute what are called payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, to their host cities: Baltimore, in recent years, received $5.4 million annually from PILOTs, Boston $17.4 million. Not in Philly. Here, nonprofits contributed a piddling $420,223 in 2010, $496,810.40 in 2011."
The resolution contends that those funds are needed now more than ever. "In the climate of increased fiscal instability and economic woes particularly for the School District of Philadelphia, it is prudent that the Council of the City of Philadelphia ensure that all property owners, including charitable organizations, are assessed for use of land that is used for commercial purposes."
Labor activists began to push the city to more carefully scrutinize non-profits last fall.
Early last year, Mayoral spokesperson Mark McDonald blamed the decline in PILOTs on Act 55 of 1997, which made it harder for the city to threaten to revoke tax-exempt status. But a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling issued last spring gave Philadelphia all the leverage it seems to need. In cash-strapped times, Mayor Nutter will be accused of leaving legit cash on the table if he does nothing to boost the contributions from Penn and other wealthy non-profits.
In related news, Councilman Bill Green, who is a likely candidate for mayor, is, according to a Council source, proposing that the city clarify that nonprofits must pay business taxes for activities not related to their core charitable missions.
Reynolds-Brown is currently the only woman currently being discussed as a possible mayoral candidate. There are, it seems, lots of possible mayoral candidates.
And so the horse race has officially landed in Naked City.
The City of Philadelphia currently does collect from not-for-profit hospitals, the question should be how do PILOTs differ from the hospital assessments which Councilmember Tasco introduced with Bill number 080465 http://legislation.phila.gov/attachments/5316.pdf amending Title 19 of the Philadelphia code by adding a new chapter imposing an assessment on net-operating revenue of general acute care hospitals; this legislation was passed unanimously and authorizing legislation has been granted by the General Assembly with the passing of House Bill 1788 (2007-2008). Suppurting detatil can be found within the Operating Budget, section 46, pages 43-50, Acute Care Hospital Assessment Fund: http://www.phila.gov/PDFs/2011OperatingBudget45-57.pdf
Five Year Financial and Strategic Plan For Fiscal Years 2013-2017, From the Office of the Director of Finance, Cash Flow Projections, page 11, Hospital Assessment Fund totals $123 million for FY2012 and 136.6 million for FY2013 http://www.phila.gov/pdfs/2012-5yearPlan.pdf
— emoney- Has anyone with responsibility in city government ever taken even an introductory course in economics? Dollars in the hands of government are less efficiently and productively employed than in the hands of the private sector. The market place is an effective arbitter of how dollars are deployed.
Workers behave in a rational fashion. In a republic they can select their employer. No one compels them to work in an organization that does not offer sick leave. By the way, this same principal applies to minimum wage.
Look at what is beginning to happen in France in the wake of that country's escalation of the marginal tax rate to 75%. Already many of the wealthy (e.g., Gerard Depardieu) have left the country and Nicolas Sarkozy is planning to do so. What might happen in this city if taxes are raised on non-profits? Has anyone looked at the other side of the ledger to account for the value-added (employment, services provided) generated by these enterprises?
lmurdah— lmurdah - Yes, lmurdah, the private sector is "an effective arbitter of how dollars are deployed" in that it deploys them like crazy into the hands of the super-rich. But who cares? Everyone else can eat platitudes about how robber-baron capitalism has been so great for this country while they efficiently go about making their private sector choices whether to eat or pay for heat.— Stan Shapiro
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