What’s next for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court? Perhaps a ruling that all businesses in the City of Pittsburgh must pay a $25 hourly minimum wage because, as it ruled in upholding the city’s Paid Sick Days Act, “the city has the express statutory authority to legislate in furtherance of disease control and prevention”?
Pshaw! you might chortle? Check the temptation because the above hardly is a hyperbolic observation. That’s especially true given the Pandora’s box opened by the state’s highest court in its decision allowing Pittsburgh to mandate that city businesses offer such an employment benefit.
The ruling of July 17 — 4-3, with Justice David Wecht writing the majority opinion – is so “circuitous” (as Justice Max Baer wrote of the court’s rationalization in dissent) as to lead reasonable people to conclude that Pittsburgh can mandate virtually anything in the name of “disease control.”
In a nutshell, the high court majority used, as those in dissent correctly concluded, “a generalized mandate to suppress disease” to overrule an expressly stated – an express grant — city home rule charter law prohibition against regulating businesses.
So, today, paid sick leave, tomorrow, that $25 hourly minimum wage? After all, the less money one makes, the less likely one can ward off disease, no? Can the “Pittsburgh Wage & Disease Control Board” be far behind?
Today, paid sick leave, tomorrow, no fossil fuel emissions within so many miles of the city’s borders? After all, any factory emissions are a bane to disease control, are they not? Surely, in the name of disease control and prevention, a new city “Industrial Air Encroachment & Disease Control Board” can mandate no emissions be allowed to enter Pittsburgh’s air space, right?
Surely the City of Pittsburgh can work in concert with the Allegheny Conference on Community Development on these projects. Ahem.
The extrapolation of the deleterious consequences of the state Supreme Court’s ruling are limited only by the new and enlarged controls “progressives” can imagine.
Sadly, the court appeared to bend over backwards to make a government diktat, not the liberty of a private business, the default position in Pittsburgh.
In dissent, Chief Justice Thomas Saylor said he was not “persuaded by the majority’s description that the Paid Sick Days Act is ‘more like a “health or safety ordinance” that affects business than a statute with its principal focus upon regulating business for its own sake.’”
“To the contrary,” Saylor wrote, “the ordinance mandates that certain benefits be included in the compensation package which businesses afford to their employees, with the underlying premise that such benefit will indirectly curtail the spread of disease through its incentive structure.”
If it walks, talks, smells and orders like an onerous business regulation, it is one. Sick leave, of course, should be up to the businesses, not the government.
This Pandora’s box now opened invites all manner of “progressive” and “social and economic justice” chicanery that will further subvert clearly stated and democratically approved legislative prerogatives.
Pittsburgh’s sick leave mandate clearly – crystal clearly – exceeded its powers under the home rule charter law. A Common Pleas Court and Commonwealth Court ruled so previously.
But that did not stop the Supreme Court majority from undermining the legislative process and substituting its judgment – a desire to “find a middle ground” – never mind that a middle ground was expressly not intended by charter law authors.
Words have meaning; the high court’s attempt to parse the meaning of “express” will only further embolden the kind of court-sanctioned onerous overlording of private business matters.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
