If you run a small business you can't afford sick pay, plain and simple. we have thousands of laws and regulations in this state, enough is enough, your strangling businesses.

This will really hurt small businesses. While in theory it sounds good, it goes overboard. I have never worked at a job where I get 7 sick days per year.

This law will mean business will have to drop PTO (personal time off) and provide "sick time".

Does this bill apply to part-time positions? If not, it will be further incentive for businesses to reduce full-time job to part-time. The job security offered by this bill, allowing workers to return to their jobs after unpaid sick leave, is even more important, and should apply across the board to businesses of every size and to all workers, including part-timers.

"Imagine this: You wake up with the flu and you feel awful. Or maybe your kid wakes up with a virus and she looks like death warmed over"...then you remember you don't have a job, so you just go back to bed. You dont have a job because the Legislature passed a sick-leave mandate that caused your former employer to move their jobs to another state, or to go without as many employees. Mandate on top of mandates. Each one sounds reasonable and just fair. Union shop, minimum wage, required healthcare, dozens of healthcare policy mandates...mandates on mandates. Every an additional reason for an employer to leave the state or to not hire someone. Wait until Obamacare kicks in with the coverage obligation for companies with more than 49 employees. You'll see an enormous increase in the number of 49 employee companies...including hundreds of companies who used to have more, but felt forced to fire them to get down to the magic 49. Is it better to be protected by all these mandates and to be without a job...or to have a job and take sick time without pay. Opps, too bad, its not your choice. That's what the mandates are all about, your employer loses their choices, and you lose your job. There has to be a reason that the employment rates and populations are all growing in the states without the excessive mandates.

Seven sick days amounts to seven additional vacation days for most employees. I wonder if, like the public sector, private sector workers will be able to "bank" unused sick time? If this is not part of the bill, you can bet that it will be. Like most well-intentioned directives from the government, this one will dramatically complicate human resource administration for small businesses.

Businesses are rational, and they offer the benefits they need to offer to attract the employees they require. In my industry, professional services, we have very rich benefits, because we have to. Industries that don't have to offer these benefits to attract employees don't. The state requiring them to do so increases their costs. They will higher fewer people. This initiative is self-defeating, which rational thinkers realize. But state legislators and Globe columnists are not rational thinkers.

BAD IDEA! I know a number people that work in the public sector. Here is what I hear from a good number of them...over and over again... I get X sick days, so I'm just taking a day off to go to Foxwoods/Skiing/Beach... Just check up on the sick days for public employees that claim to be sick on a given day...make sure to call their home number! Note that sick day headcountis are less on rainy days and/or middle of week!! Providing sick days will accomplish the following: a) Abuse of sick day policies for private companies. b) Less marginal people hired by private employers c) More marginal people fired/layed off for reasons other than abuse of sick days. If they abuse sick days they certainly will have other issues.

There are other unintended consequences. I know of a highly successful 300-person firm in Cambridge that gives employees "as many days off as they want" to combine sick and vacation. They get people not to abuse it in innovative ways. But their policy innovation would be illegal under this bill. Other firms have sick-day honor systems that allow several days, but don't guarantee them so they don't get abused. We don't want to interfere with the innovative ways that local companies are dealing with time off by a one-size-fits-all system. And the idea of the government saying, "You're so dumb that you don't realize this will save money" is really insulting to businesspeople. They know what will and will not save them money.

Wow, most commenters "get" the law of unintended results. In my office, we had MANDATORY paid sick leave: i,e. if you're contagious,stay home! But we were too busy to cheat. I have no doubt that eventually this will be abused by many, saved up by others with a demand for a check at the end of employment, which incredibly many union employees get at the expense of taxpayers.