WASHINGTON – With only a few days left before Election Day, a number of corporations are highlighting the importance of civic engagement by providing paid time off for employees to vote this year. Civic engagement advocates hope this will eliminate a common reason cited for not voting, sparking a cultural shift and generating high voter turnout this year and beyond.
“Getting time off to vote is consistently a reason why people say they didn’t vote. They say they didn’t have time,” said Patagonia spokesman J.J. Huggins. “We’re removing that one hurdle from people.”
In the 2016 election, a survey by Pew Research Center found that 14% of nonvoters said they did not vote because they were “too busy” or had a “conflicting schedule.”
There is no federal law that requires corporations to give workers time off on Election Day. According to electionday.org, only 23 states have laws that require companies to provide some form of paid time off to vote.
Several advocacy groups, including Time to Vote, have partnered with corporations to try to change the voting roadblock.
Time to Vote, a nonpartisan initiative urging companies to encourage election participation, was founded by executives from Patagonia, Levi Strauss, and Paypal in 2018. It began with 400 partner companies and have since grown to over 1700 companies over the past few weeks.
“Voter turnout rates in this country are still pathetically low,” Huggins said. “We thought we hopefully could play a small role in helping to boost that turnout.”
The general recommendation from Time to Vote is for corporations to provide between two and four paid hours for workers to vote. This time would cover standing in line at polling places, filling out ballots and educating themselves on the process or issues.
Some companies, like KPMG, followed these guidelines and offered several hours of paid time off that are usable the week leading up to the election. Other corporations, like Patagonia, went further and provided employees with a full paid day off on Nov. 3.
Nielsen, a market research company, offered employees a paid mental health day before Election Day and a consistent stream of election information.
“They’ve been informing us and saying, ‘These are the deadlines for Chicago. These are the polling places you can go to,’” Dania Gutierrez, a Nielsen employee in Chicago, said.
Levi Strauss spokeswoman Kelly Mason said that the company is providing extra benefits for those who volunteer as poll workers.
“That’s just one way to fill one of the specific needs that we’ve seen this year with COVID, where having younger, healthy poll workers is really important,” Mason said.
Many corporate employees have the flexibility to request time off or visit the polls outside their normal work hours, especially with so many work environments that are largely remote. However, frontline and hourly employees generally do not have that luxury, creating barriers to getting the polls outside of their work schedule.
“It is a very classist thing to not have Election Day off because you know that it’s the frontline workers, the hourly workers, that you’re restricting from going and voting,” Gutierrez said.
To compensate, Time to Vote said that it works with companies to organize schedules and ensure that each person has a block of time allocated to vote on Election Day.
But Election Day looks different this year. Many people have voted or plan to vote before Nov. 3 either in person, absentee or through mail-in ballots. Some corporations are allowing flexibility to take time off the week before the election to stand in line or drop off ballots.
“We’ve always been so focused on Election Day. Now we’re in this new world where Election Day is only the last day you can vote. It’s like election season this year,” Huggins said.
Going forward, Time to Vote representatives said they hope to engrain a culture that emphasizes the importance of civic engagement in corporations. This would target the 14% of nonvoters who a Pew Research Center survey said decided not to vote in 2016 due to a lack of interest in the candidates or issues.
“When companies kind of bake this into their corporate culture, then the workforce begins to realize that their civic duty is something that they should take more seriously,” Huggins said.