Paid Vacation Plan Could Help Nearly 1M NYers, Estimate Shows

NEW YORK — A proposal to mandate paid personal time for most New York City employees could help nearly a million people, almost twice as many as previously thought, Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration says.

City Hall released a new analysis Tuesday of the potential impact of a bill to require businesses with five or more employees to give their workers at least 10 days of paid personal time. It would guarantee vacation time to about 900,000 full- and part-time workers who currently have none, the analysis found.

De Blasio's office initially said the bill could help over 500,000 people when the mayor announced the proposal in January. The new numbers show that far more New Yorkers are languishing without the promise of time for themselves or their families, the Democratic mayor argued.

"This is an agenda that’s been foisted on all of us by corporate America and too often with the help of our federal government, where working people get less and less and the wealthy get more and more," de Blasio said at a City Hall news conference. "Working people work harder and harder and they don’t get their fair share back."

De Blasio revealed the new estimate ahead of the legislation's first City Council hearing on Tuesday. The measure is sponsored by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who first proposed a version of it in 2014.

The majority of the New Yorkers without paid vacation time — about 520,000 — work for large companies with at least 50 employees, according to the city's analysis. Roughly 120,000 more work for small businesses with about five to nine employees, accounting for about half the workforce employed by firms that size, the analysis shows.

The Council bill would guarantee those workers up to 10 days off each year for vacation, time with family, religious observances or any other purpose.

The new estimate incorportates figures from a 2018 survey of low-income New Yorkers by the Community Service Society, an anti-poverty nonprofit group, along with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Infogroup U.S. Business Database, a mayoral spokeswoman said.

The survey data was not available when City Hall released the earlier estimate, which was based on state and federal figures, according to the spokeswoman.

De Blasio is pushing to make New York the nation's first city to mandate paid vacation time as he builds his nascent presidential campaign as a champion of working people. He said the United States is the world's only industrialized nation without such a guarantee.

That point was underscored by the iconic feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who was on hand to support the proposal Tuesday.

"We are behind other nations in forcing this impossible choice between, say, attending a parent-teacher conference or a funeral and losing a job," Steinem said. "And we’re also behind in child care and other areas. But with New York City taking the lead, I have confidence that others will follow."

While de Blasio championed paid sick leave, universal pre-kindergarten and a higher minimum wage earlier in his tenure, his push for the paid vacation guarantee comes about five years after Williams first introduced legislation to establish it.

But the mayor said he just couldn't get everything done at the same time.

"You have to focus on an agenda and development of agenda," he said. "You can’t pass everything at once. We decided on what we thought was most necessary to do in sequence."

Williams, for his part, said he was excited that his proposal could soon become a reality.

"I just want to get it done," he said.