Paul Edward Parker’s Providence Journal article profiling businesses that are and aren’t concerned or confused about Rhode Island’s recently passed law to force employers to provide paid time off for employees implies the reason the legislation was a product of hubris:

“I can’t even imagine how that would work out, being a seasonal business,” Bitto said in a telephone interview last week. At Evelyn’s, the season runs from mid-April to Oct. 1. …

With the Evelyn’s season running about 170 days, any employees who work the whole season will be able to use their accrued sick time during the last two or three weeks of their employment. …

“Honestly, I have no focus on it at all,” she said. “I’m just busy running the business, worrying about my freezer breaking down.”

Meanwhile:

Dan Dwight, president and chief executive of the Pawtucket-based Cooley Group, which makes fabric and polymer roof membranes, isn’t sweating the new law. His company, which has about 130 employees in Rhode Island, already provides paid sick days.

For the most part, employers who can offer this benefit already do, and those that don’t have a good reason and (given market pressures) have probably accounted for the omission somewhere else in their compensation packages or business practices.  That could mean higher pay, to attract employees willing to forgo paid time off, or a work environment that is attractive for some intangible reason or hiring people who might not otherwise be able to find work (like young adults looking for seasonal jobs).

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Forcing this regulation on every business reduces employees’ negotiation leverage, makes it more difficult for new businesses to get going and to expand, and gives some businesses an advantage over others simply because of their size or because the nature of their work better lends itself to this particular benefit. In the long run, the result won’t be that every Rhode Island employee has paid time off so much as that those whose potential employers who can’t offer it simply won’t exist.