A handful of states that prohibit local sick leave ordinances, including Maryland, Oregon, Rhode Island and New Jersey, do require businesses to provide sick leave, but bar cities from going beyond the state requirements. Other states, such as Wisconsin, don’t have a state rule and prohibit cities from passing their own.

In 2008, voters in Milwaukee approved a paid sick leave measure with support from nearly 70 percent of voters, making the city the third in the country, behind San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to approve one. But in 2011, newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-led Legislature reversed the Milwaukee measure and approved a law to preempt other Wisconsin cities from following its lead.

The clash over paid sick leave is part of a broader divide between conservative states and their more liberal cities on a wide range of issues, including minimum wage laws, fracking, plastic bag bans, municipal broadband and anti-discrimination ordinances that protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.

Earlier this month, in a political maneuver that some called unprecedented, Michigan lawmakers enacted a law requiring paid sick days only to block a similar ballot initiative from being put to voters Nov. 6. The Republican-led Legislature likely will roll back the measure.

By passing the law to provide paid sick leave to nearly 2 million workers, Michigan lawmakers stopped a ballot initiative that, if passed, they would need a three-fourths majority to overturn. Instead, they need only a majority to undo the law they passed before it goes into effect.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Robert Sedler, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. “This is like a bait and switch.”

Christina Hayes, a Detroit mother who was diagnosed with lupus at age 19 and has since become an advocate for paid sick leave, said the move felt like “little punches” to those who spent months going door to door to help gather petition signatures.

Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, a nonprofit pushing for paid leave reforms nationwide, called the move “another form of voter suppression” and “a new level of dirty tricks.”

But Wendy Block, a lobbyist for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, defended lawmakers. “You look at this proposal on its face and you say, ‘Oh, mandatory sick leave — it must be a good thing.’ But, really, the devil is in the details,” she said, referring to the ballot measure.

“A one-size-fits-all policy is really not appropriate for our state,” she said. Some employers provide more generous leave policies than would be allowed under the proposal, while other employers can’t afford the leave time they’d be forced to offer, according to Block.

“The proposal in Michigan really is the most extreme that has been introduced yet in this country,” she said, “and full of lots of legal landmines.”

The proposal requires one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked; applies to all employees and independent contractors; and allows employees to use their time in as little as 6-minute increments.

Paid-leave advocates increasingly are turning to ballot initiatives to bypass resistant legislatures. Excluding Michigan, three of the 10 states to require paid sick time — Massachusetts in 2014, and Arizona and Washington in 2016 — did so through citizen-led ballot initiatives.

An ‘Uneven Expansion’

Overall, the number of U.S. workers with paid sick leave is growing, but the availability of the benefit varies by region. Seventy-five percent of private industry workers in the Northeast and 81 percent of private industry workers in the West have access to paid sick leave, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, compared with 67 percent in the South and 64 percent in the Midwest.

Workers in rural areas are less likely than workers in cities and suburbs to have five or more paid sick days, according to a 2011 brief by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

The growing movement is “really starting to show a story of the uneven expansion of these policies,” said Shilpa Phadke, vice president of the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. “And what that does is remind us why we really need the federal baseline.”

With a federal sick leave measure stalled in Congress and stiff resistance in Republican-led states, more cities are acting on their own.

Cities Take the Lead