Paid family leave becomes hot workplace issue

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

When Nitish Khanapure's second child was born he took four weeks off from his job as a technology manager for Washington Mutual bank and got paid during his time at home bonding with his newborn.

It wasn’t his employer that ponied up the money for the non-vacation time he used. The income came thanks to the paid family leave law in the state of California.

“It’s kind of an incentive to take some time off and help with the newborn,” he says about the law, which went into effect in 2005.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have such an incentive? Chances are you probably don’t.

Up until last month, California and Washington were the only states with any type of family leave legislation on the books. New Jersey passed a paid leave bill in late May. New Jersey and Washington’s programs take effect in 2009.

Most employers don’t provide any type of paid leave to take care of a new baby or an ailing parent. A study by the Society of Human Resource Management found that only one-third of companies offered paid family leave.

The 15-year-old Family and Medical Leave Act requires most employers to let workers take up to 12 weeks off without pay and return to their old jobs or comparable positions. (The law generally applies to companies with 50 or more employees.) But many employees are hard-pressed to take off so much time without pay.

The lack of paid leave is unusual among the world’s industrialized nations. Other nations without paid family leave include Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland, says Kate Kahan, director of Work/Family program for the National Partnership for Women & Families.

“We are way out of sync with the world,” Kahan says. “We are out of step with the evolving American family.”

The U.S. system generally is structured around the old model of Mom staying home with the kids and Dad being the breadwinner. “Workplace policies need to catch up to the fact that 70 percent of families have both parents working,” she says.

There are movements in a handful of other states, including New York, Massachusetts and Oregon, to implement paid leave, but many advocates believe time off with pay should be mandated at the federal level. Two bills now circulating in Congress would mandate eight to 12 weeks of paid leave.

One bipartisan bill sponsored by Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), calls for eight weeks of paid family leave within a one-year period. Benefits would be paid out on a tiered system depending on salary. The program, which would not affect companies with 50 employees or fewer, would be funded by employee, employer and the federal government.

A second bill in the House would mandate 12 weeks of paid leave. The legislation also includes a tiered wage system and would be funded by a new trust fund. Employers and employees would pay into the fund equally through payroll deductions, similar to unemployment benefits.

“So many people can’t afford to take advantage of unpaid family leave,” says Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a co-sponsor of the House bill. He said passage of the bill would be a victory for "family structure and family preservation."

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