By Tracey I. Levy

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (“FFCRA”), which provides up to two weeks of paid, job-protected sick leave to covered employees for a variety of COVID-related reasons, and additional leave for care of a child related to COVID, is scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2020. Presently, there seems to be limited legislative or executive effort to extend the law beyond that date, even as we remain in the throes of the pandemic. That means that, as of January 1, 2021, employees will no longer be eligible for FFCRA leave, any employee who is on leave as of December 31, 2020 will be ineligible for continued leave after that date, and employers who continue to grant employees leave for an FFCRA-qualifying reason will not be entitled to claim tax credits for paid COVID leave days subsequent to December 31. In a nutshell, the sunset clause means an end to any federal paid leave benefit or tax credit, and restoration to the way things were back in March 2020, before the pandemic.

While those consequences are relatively simple to explain, the interplay with New York State law makes things a bit more complicated. New York State passed its own COVID-related leave law, which took effect on the same day as the FFCRA. New York State’s law grants all employees COVID-related leave if an employee is personally subject to a mandatory or precautionary order of quarantine or isolation due to COVID-19, provided the employee is not physically able to work remotely while under quarantine. Employees are disqualified from the NYS COVID-related leave benefit only if they are being quarantined for having traveled outside the U.S., for non-work-mandated reasons, to a country for which the employee was on advance notice of a level two or level three travel notice having been issued by the CDC. New York State’s COVID-related leave law has no sunset date; rather, the leave benefit is specifically tied to COVID-19 and therefore, for as long as employees are subject to COVID-related quarantine or isolation orders, they remain eligible for the benefits provided under the state’s law.

As we noted previously in the Summer 2020 issue of our newsletter, Takeaways, employees who are directed by a healthcare provider to quarantine or isolate can obtain a quarantine or isolation order by following a process jointly defined by the New York State Departments of Health and Labor to request such an order from their local health department. New York City had issued a standing order with various appendices that, when satisfied, would be deemed to meet the state law quarantine order requirement, but the city has since withdrawn that page from its website.

For those employees who meet the NYS eligibility criteria, employers must provide the following, depending on their profitability and the size of their workforce:

• 14 calendar days of job-protected, paid COVID-related leave, at the employee’s regular rate of pay, if the employer has 100 or more employees;
• 5 calendar days of job-protected, paid COVID-related leave, at the employee’s regular rate of pay, and an additional 9 calendar days of job-protected, unpaid leave, if the employer has 11 to 99 employees or has fewer employees but had a net profit of $1,000,000 or more last year; and
• 14 calendar days of job-protected, unpaid COVID-related leave, for all other employers with 10 or fewer employees.

Employees are entitled to apply for New York State Short-Term Disability and Paid Family Leave benefits, simultaneously and without any waiting period, during the unpaid portion of their quarantine leave, and all COVID-related leave is in addition to, and gets used before, any paid time off the employee may have otherwise available under the employer’s paid leave policies or the new New York State paid sick leave law.  New York State provides no reimbursement or subsidy to employers for the paid sick leave benefits required under the law.

As a reminder, FFCRA also provided employees with partially-paid leave benefits, of varying duration, in the event they were caring for a child or family member who was quarantined due to COVID. New York State law has no similar provision. However, to the extent an employee meets the eligibility criteria for Paid Family Leave (having worked at least 20 hours per week for 26 consecutive weeks), if either (i) the employee’s child has been quarantined and the employee is unable to work remotely while caring for that child, or (ii) the employee is unable to work because the employee needs to care for a close family member who contracts COVID-19, the employee can submit a claim for job-protected Paid Family Leave and receive paid time off benefits under that program.

New York State employers must therefore continue to provide COVID-related paid sick leave benefits to their employees, where the eligibility criteria are met, and shoulder those benefit costs, for as long as we are facing COVID-19-related quarantine orders.