Joe Biden breaks promise to guarantee seven days of paid sick leave

President Joe Biden promised in 2020 that, if elected, he would make seven days of paid sick leave permanent.

But that never came to fruition. 

Biden said his sick leave plan would match the Healthy Families Act, a proposal by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. That measure would have required that employers allow employees accrue up to seven paid sick days per year. In 2021, Murray and DeLauro introduced companion bills, but neither advanced.

But the Murray-DeLauro effort was put on ice when Democrats focused on enacting another Biden promise to guarantee 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for workers who fall ill, need to care for an ill relative, or are caring for a new child. A provision that made it into Biden's Build Back Better bill offered a scaled-down version of four weeks per year of paid leave.

That version of the bill passed the House in November 2021 but a few Democratic lawmakers in the Senate objected to the measure's scope, and the provision was removed. The bill that eventually passed both chambers, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, didn't address paid leave.

Currently, workers at companies with 50 or more employees can take unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

We rate this Promise Broken.