This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Showing solidarity with workers on Labor Day, President Barack Obama on Monday signed an executive order requiring paid sick leave for employees of federal contractors, including 300,000 who currently receive none.

The White House would not specify the cost to federal contractors to implement the executive order, which Obama detailed in a speech to a major union rally and breakfast in Boston. The Labor Department said any costs would be offset by savings contractors would see as a result of lower attrition rates and increased worker loyalty, but produced nothing to back that up.

Under the executive order, employees working on federal contracts will gain the right to a minimum of one hour of paid leave for every 30 hours they work. Stretched over 12 months, that will add up to seven days a year. The order will allow employees to use the leave to care for sick relatives, and will affect contracts starting in 2017 – just as Obama leaves office.

The Obama administration has been working on the executive order for months, and chose Labor Day to announce it as the president seeks to enact what policies he can before his presidency ends, despite resistance in Congress to laws he has proposed to improve workplace conditions.

That push has reverberated in the 2016 campaign, where Democratic candidates are seeking to draw a distinction with Republicans on who is most supportive of the middle class.

“There are certain Republicans that said we can’t afford to do this,” said labor secretary, Thomas Perez, before Obama’s speech. He lamented how paid leave is seen as a partisan issue in the US, despite broad support in Europe: “The Republican party is out of step with similar conservative governments around the world.”

Roughly 44 million private-sector workers do not get paid sick leave – about 40% of the private-sector workforce, the White House said.

In his speech to the Greater Boston Labor Council’s breakfast, Obama criticized Republican presidential candidates for attempting to rebrand themselves as the party of working Americans and a party of middle-class values.

“These folks are stubborn,” he said. “They don’t let facts or evidence get in the way. They really don’t.”

Obama renewed his call for Congress to expand the requirement beyond contract workers and to all but the smallest businesses, an idea that has gained little traction on Capitol Hill.

“Find a way to make paid family and medical leave a reality for all Americans,” he said. “It’s past time we did this. It will be good for business.”

Obama also called on Congress to pass a budget when they come back from their summer recess this week.

The Labor Day gathering in Boston was attracting other big-name politicians, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Boston’s mayor, Marty Walsh, among them. Vice-President Joe Biden, who is considering entering the Democratic presidential primary, echoed the labor rights theme in a march with the AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka, at a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh.

Biden said the main reason he was elected to his first public office was a local union endorsement.

“I won because of the steelworkers,” Biden, a longtime Delaware senator, told the crowd. He went on to say that labor unions in the US had been clobbered, after the National Chamber of Commerce declared “war on labor”. What has happened to labor in the US was “devastating”, he said.

Republicans in Washington – and those who are trying to get there – are waging a constant war against unions, said Obama. Without naming names, he criticized 2016 Republican presidential candidates for wanting to make anti-union right-to-work policies the “law of the land” and opposing raising the minimum wage.

“What is it about working men and women that they find so offensive?” Obama asked, quoting the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. “These are the folks who built America.”

Obama also took this opportunity to make a few football related-jokes, picking at Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots. Brady last week won an appeal against the NFL, which attempted to suspend him for four games over a scandal about intentionally deflated footballs.

“Brady is free!” Obama quipped, at the beginning of his speech.

“If I were looking for a good job that builds security for my family, I would join a union. If I wanted someone to have my back, I would join a union,” Obama said, to roaring applause.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Obama greets Senator Elizabeth Warren. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Referring to the NFL Players Association, he continued: “Even Brady’s happy he’s got a union. They had his back.”

Unable to push much of his agenda through a Republican-controlled Congress, Obama has in recent years used executive orders to apply to federal contractors policies he lacks the authority to enact nationwide. His aim is to lay the groundwork for those policies to be expanded to all Americans.

Earlier executive orders have barred federal contractors from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, raised the minimum wage for contractors and expanded the number of contract workers eligible for overtime.

Although labor groups have hailed such moves, they remain deeply skeptical of Obama’s push to secure sweeping new trade deals with the Asia-Pacific region and with Europe. Many unions have warned that the deals could lead to the widespread elimination of certain types of US jobs.

The White House said it could not estimate how many federal contractors do not offer paid leave now, citing a maze of state and local laws that make crunching the numbers difficult. Officials also declined to put a dollar figure on how much contractors would face in added compensation costs.

Cecilia Muniz, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, said the administration has an obligation to get the most out of every federal tax dollar.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.