Paid Parental Leave

Take a moment to think about this: you and your significant other just took the step to become parents. Though you are young, you both believed it was time and went ahead and brought a baby into your lives. Staring at your baby and your spouse with loving eyes, you do not think life can get any better. However blissful life may seem, things soon come crashing down. You and your significant other work average wage jobs and are having a hard-enough time supporting each other, and now the cost of diapers, clothes, furniture, formula and baby food are creeping in on you and sucking the life out of your bank account. You want to spend time with your new bundle of joy, but suddenly, your baby is being ripped out of your hands and being sent to an

Paid maternity leave protects families from financial stress and bombardment. Per the Washington Post in the article “Defending Paid Parental leave” on September 2, 2009, “One of the side effects of the bad economy is that good ideas that sound expensive begin getting ignored. Take paid parental leave. Making sure that parents can afford to take time off to have a baby is a good idea on a number of fronts. It protects families from the choice of financial calamity or time with a newborn.”

Two scholars from American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs, share similar opinions with Schlafly about child bearing and its impact. Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs wrote the article titled, “The ’77 Cents on the Dollar’ Myth About Women’s Pay”. Perry and Biggs agree with Schlafly that having children does not benefit women’s salaries and the gender wage gap. Biggs and Perry claim that when mothers leave the workforce to take care of their children it creates a disadvantage to them. They explain that when the mothers return the workforce, “they have less work experience than similarly-aged males” (5). They correlate experience with wages; saying that new mothers will not have as much experience, which will lead to a smaller paycheck when they return. Perry and Biggs also argue that new mothers are less appealing to employers because their male counter-parts who are of similar age, will have more experience than them (5). The employers may feel that the new mothers may not be as qualified or become as successful as a man. Ultimately, like Schlafly they argue that women who choose to have children are willingly creating part of the wage gap because they are choosing to have limited experience in exchange for

Is America falling behind the rest of the world in terms of the services it provides? As a proud citizen of this great nation I, unfortunately, have to say “yes.” Our once outstanding country has been falling behind in a number of areas including technology, education, economics, and yes, even in family care! America is now one of only three industrialized countries that hasn’t set up a nationwide policy for paid parental leave. With this knowledge I desired to know more, particularly if we as a nation are not doing much to rectify the situation. Then, to learn if any states were doing something about this issue which effects so many people in the workforce. I wanted to see exactly how far behind, compared to the rest world, we are in the issue of paid parental leave. The Pew Research Center conducted a study of government supported leave in 38 OECD countries, and found that the US had the lowest figures with zero weeks of paid leave. Though we did fare better when it came to the number of weeks provided for protected leave with 12 weeks. We were still far worse than most other OECD countries (see Figure 1 at right). Knowing that we were rated worse I wanted to know what people are saying that we can and should be doing to change this situation?

The FMLA entitles eligible employees to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons with continuation of group health insurance coverage under the same terms and conditions as if the employee had not taken leave. http://www.dol.gov/whd/fmla/

In 1993, the United States passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Under this act, eligible employees are entitled to twelve weeks worth of unpaid, job-protected leave (with continued health insurance coverage as if they had not taken leave) per year for the following reasons: the birth and taking care of a child one year or younger; to care for an adopted/foster child for 1 year after the adoption/placement; to care for a spouse, child, or parent who has a serious health condition; a serious health condition that prohibits the employee from during their job; or any need that may arise due to the fact that the employee’s spouse, child, or parent is a covered military member on covered active duty. Eligible employees are also entitled to twenty-six weeks per year to care for a covered servicemember with

Having an above average sex life may depend on one factor among others: dividing not only bed sheets but also everyday tasks of child care. But since the US is the only developed nation that doesn’t require companies to provide mothers or fathers any paid parental leave http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/ilo-bookstore/order-online/books/WCMS_242615/lang--en/index.htm, is this report really meaningful?

The lack of a paid parental leave law in the country does not necessarily mean that it is absent in the U.S. labor market. Some generous and more progressive companies do recognize the importance of the leave to employees and do offer it. According to the Employee Benefits Survey of 2015, 21% of employers nationally offer some paid maternity leave while 17% offer some paid paternity/adoption leave. However, about a fifth don’t have any kind of protected maternity, paternity, or adoptive leave. (Ray, 8; Time, n. pag.)

It has been argued that maternity leave is not only harmful to business but also to women themselves, and that it can be a burden on businesses so they may think twice about employing women. (7) Where leave is given, whether paid or unpaid, businesses have to fill the position vacated by the parents and this in itself creates additional work and cost for employers who have to pay for job advertisements, background checks and time for interviews. They are also faced with the cost of training the temporary

In addition to monetary compensation, the benefits offered by varying companies are often taken into consideration when job candidates are weighing their different job options. When an organization offers excellent benefits, candidates are willing to take less in monetary compensation for the comfort provided by certain benefits. For example, extended maternity and paternity leave options, paid or partially paid, attract and retain young workers who plan to build a family in the near future. While you can’t expect every organization to offer full pay during an extended time off to raise a family, knowing that your organization will provide some kind of support is reassuring during this time where families often rely on the pay of both spouses. Other nations have already enacted legislation that requires extensive maternity leave; such as Israel who provides women with twelve months with 100 percent pay (Pynes, 2013). Currently, the United States only requires twelve weeks of unpaid leave. If certain organizations were to offer substantially better benefits, their desirability to

Employment, Family Leave, and Parents of Newborns or Seriously Ill Children describes Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and California’s Paid Family Leave Insurance (PFIL) both promote an individual to take time off for their family to care for illnesses or newborns. The article used a semi structured qualitative interview with 20 newborn parents and 20 parents of children with special needs from Los Angeles with equal ration of men and women from different families. The article found that many parents do not thoroughly understand their benefits and sometimes made decisions that are not well thought of and less beneficial because of their complexity. The article does note that families that are planning newborns were less stressed compared to

In the US, paid parental leave is considered to be a benefit provided by employers, but not required. Yet, only 12% of workers reported having such coverage in 2013, according to an estimate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Compensation Survey. According to the United States Department of Labor, paid maternity leave can increase female labor force participation by making it easier for women to stay in the workforce after giving birth, which contributes to economic growth. Furthermore, when parents are better supported at work through paid family and medical leave, they are also less likely to rely on public assistance benefits. Paid leave leads to better outcomes for parents and

As a person I personally do not mind paying more taxes as long as it actually went to people who are in need of assistance. I understand that there are people in our society struggling and I believe they should have access to programs that could help the better themselves. The system in which people are picked for the program is flawed because it can easily be tricked which is how people who do not need the assistance can get in the programs.

There are also those who point to paid maternity leave as a way of dealing with concerns about the ageing of the Australian population and declining birth rate. Demographer Professor Peter McDonald claims that Australia cannot afford to continue with its system of unpaid leave if it wants to encourage the birth rate, which is presently below replacement levels. Striking a balance between affordable policies and meeting the needs of families is challenging. Many agree that it is unfair for business alone to be expected to shoulder the burden of paid leave.

Access to paid leave is often identified as an issue that primarily concerns working mothers, yet paid leave is also critically important for working fathers. In a society that continues to evolve, it is even more imperative to address this unequal access with an increasing number of fathers who are serving as stay at home parents (International Labor Organization, 2014). Legislation that supports fathers having the support they need to prioritize family responsibilities can significantly increase the personal and economic well-being of their growing families (United States Department of Labor, 2015). Despite these advantages, the growing importance of paternal involvement with their newborns is not always supported in today’s society. The economic and social barriers fathers face may hinder them from taking paternity leave altogether, such as inadequate access to paid leave and outdated cultural norms about male breadwinners. According to survey data, most fathers in the United States only take one day of leave time for every month the typical mother takes (Harrington et al., 2014). This means that even in the twenty-first century, it appears to be more widely accepted for mothers to take off time from work to care for their families than fathers. Fewer than half the countries in the world provide men with access to paid leave to care for a new child, while virtually all provide paid maternity leave (ILO, 2014). Paid paternity leave and laws related to promote