Access to Paid Sick Time in San Antonio, Texas

Approximately 39 percent of workers in San Antonio lack paid sick time, and low-income and part-time workers are especially unlikely to be covered. Access to paid sick time promotes safe and healthy work environments by preventing the spread of illness (Kumar, et al. 2013; Drago and Miller, 2010) and reducing workplace injuries (Asfaw, Pana-Cryan, and Rosa 2012), reducing health care costs (Miller, Williams, and Yi 2011), allowing workers time to visit doctors, and helping working adults fulfill caregiving responsibilities by reducing work-family conflict (Allen, et al. 2014; DeRigne, Stoddard-Dare, and Quinn 2016). This briefing paper presents estimates of access to paid sick time in San Antonio by sex, race and ethnicity, employment sector, occupation, part/full-time employment status, and earnings levels through analyses of government data sources, including the 2014–2016 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS).

Access to Paid Sick Time by Sex and Racial/Ethnic Group

Among workers in San Antonio, 61 percent have access to paid sick time (Figure 1), and 39 percent, or about 354,000 workers, lack access (Table 1).[1]
Hispanic and Black workers are less likely to have paid sick time than workers in any other racial/ethnic group (Figure 1): 43 percent of Hispanic and 37 percent of Black workers lack access to paid sick time, compared with 34 percent of White workers, 34 percent of Asian workers, and 33 percent of workers of some other or two or more races (Table 1).
State and local government workers are much more likely than private sector workers to have paid sick time: 87 percent of state and local government workers have access to paid sick time in San Antonio, compared with 56 percent of private sector workers (Figure 1).