When 58 percent of Missouri voters approved Proposition A in November 2024, they assumed that the ballot measure’s passage would finally grant private sector workers the ability to take paid time off when they were sick or needed to care for an ailing family member. But they were wrong.
Although the paid sick leave policy took effect on May 1, 2025, allowing workers in companies with fifteen or more employees to earn one hour of paid leave for every thirty hours worked, the state’s Republican-dominated legislature opted to override the popular vote and overturn key parts of the measure just two weeks later. Governor Mike Kehoe signed the repeal into law on July 10.
The short-lived paid sick leave benefit will end on August 28, retroactively erasing the benefits that Missouri workers have accrued since May 1 unless their employers voluntarily honor the hours earned.
Not surprisingly, this turn of events has been widely condemned by residents of the Show Me State. But Missouri’s lack of mandated paid sick leave is far from an anomaly: Across the United States, millions of workers have no job protection when they’re ill and lose income if they take time off.
Federal law does not require employers to provide workers with sick time to recover from an illness or attend to a child, partner, or parent who needs care. This makes the United States an outlier internationally—only eight other countries, including Micronesia, Palau, Somalia, South Korea, and Sri Lanka, fail to mandate that workers receive short-term leave, with pay, to recover from an illness.
According to Jared Make, vice president of A Better Balance (ABB), a national organization that works to promote policies that support working families, just seventeen states and the District of Columbia currently guarantee paid sick leave. Illinois, Maine, and Nevada go further, mandating paid time off that can be used for any reason. The remaining thirty, however, currently have no laws requiring paid sick leave accrual.
As a result, ABB reports, nearly seventy-three million people, or 43 percent of the labor force, do not have a single day of salaried sick leave under state or local law. Moreover, eighteen states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin) prohibit counties, towns, and cities from providing paid sick time benefits to the local workforce.
Fifty-six percent of the nation’s Black labor force lives in these eighteen states, according to ABB. What’s more, these states are also home to 23.4 million working parents, 5.5 million disabled workers, and 10.3 million wage earners under the age of twenty-five, populations that often struggle to make ends meet.
But this seems of little concern to many state and federal lawmakers.
Missouri’s repeal of Proposition A, for example, was made possible because state lawmakers have the authority to invalidate Voter Initiatives. States can also limit what localities can do due to a policy called preemption which establishes that when local municipal law and state law conflict, the higher-level authority supersedes the lower-level authority. This allows state legislators to legally block local efforts to enact policies they don’t like or want to quash.
“Preemption, itself, is a neutral policy tool,” Katie Belanger, a consultant to the Local Solutions Support Center, tells The Progressive, “but it comes down to how it is used and its impact on real people. Right now, we’re seeing preemption target and harm traditionally excluded groups, including BIPOC people, the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants, and working folks.”
Belanger adds that preemption has been used nationwide to stop localities from establishing pro-worker policies within their borders, curbing efforts to raise the minimum wage, institute better safety protections, and stop local governments from requiring employers to provide paid sick time to their employees. It’s also been used to deny students’ and school staff’s right to use students’ preferred name or pronouns; to keep local governments from launching guaranteed basic income programs; to limit sanctuary protections for undocumented immigrants; to kill local ordinances regulating single-use plastic bags; and to stop municipalities from passing mandatory background checks for gun purchases.
“About fifteen years ago, corporate special interests began looking to close paths to progressive reforms,” Belanger says. “We started to see that efforts to protect workers and give them greater rights were being passed by cities. Corporate special interests began working to shut this down, and along with the Heritage Foundation, the Chamber of Commerce, lobbyists from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the National Restaurant Association, the American Beverage Association, and Peter Thiel’s Cicero Institute, they made common cause with social conservatives. Preemption gives them a way to advance a rightwing agenda, block progress, and consolidate power.”
In Missouri, legislative preemption has left pro-worker organizers debating what to do next. Since Proposition A was a voter initiative, pro-worker activists in Missouri are considering whether to sideline preemption by attempting to make sick leave a protected right in the state constitution. If constitutionally protected, paid sick leave would no longer be reversible by legislative fiat.
While some activists favor this approach, Richard von Glahn, policy director at Missouri Jobs with Justice, cautions that getting a constitutional amendment passed can be both labor-intensive and expensive.
“It would require us to collect about 300,000 signatures by May 2026 to ensure that we have the necessary 180,000 needed to get the measure on the ballot,” he tells The Progressive. “Folks are considering this, but we’re also considering other paths.” Among them, he says, are efforts to urge employers to retain the paid leave policy that voters approved last November, since the revocation does not require them to abandon it.
In addition, some activists want to organize to bar legislators from repealing voter initiatives like Proposition A by requiring that 80 percent of the legislature sign on to a repeal or revision. Others are pushing to boot anti-labor lawmakers from their positions in state government.
“We have to see what path we want to go down,” von Glahn says. “We will listen to workers and hear what they think we should do going forward. We know that Missourians support paid sick leave, so we’re going to see if voters can exert enough political pressure on elected officials in Springfield to get them to bring it back as a protected right.”
Kelly Smith, an activist and organizer with the Nonviolent Medicaid Army, notes that “efforts to curtail worker rights are indicative of an out-and-out war on the poor that is gaining momentum. Things like paid sick leave disproportionately impact workers in lower-wage jobs. These workers typically can’t afford to lose a day’s pay if they’re sick, so they have no choice but to send their kids to school and go to work no matter how awful they feel. An unpaid day or two can put their whole family in a precarious position and set off a cascade of additional problems.”
Belanger agrees, but while she knows that the situation facing workers and the poor is dire, she still sees this as a time of opportunity. The formation of an unprecedented array of intersectional, multi-issue coalitions, she says, gives her hope.
“A great deal of today’s coalition work is grounded in anti-racism, and it is being led by those who are being harmed the most,” she adds. “This is a dark moment, but it’s also a time when transformational progress is possible.”
Editor's note: This article was edited to include updated numbers for the states that have and do not have sick leave policies.