It was announced today that President Trump’s budget for 2018 will include paid family leave. Here’s everything HR and employers need to know.
Basically, the proposed plan includes a provision for both mothers and fathers to be granted six weeks of paid leave following the birth—or adoption—of a child.
This is quite a change from the current system of zero weeks of mandated paid leave.
According to The Washington Post, workers currently “can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave after a birth, as long as they’ve worked at a company that employs at least 50 people for a year. A little more than half of American companies already offer the benefit: 58 percent replace at least some wages during maternity leave, and 12 percent cover some leave for dads.”
Trump’s proposal, driven by his daughter and advisor Ivanka during the election campaign, would be a step toward bringing America up to speed with the rest of the world.
Quartz reported that the U.S. is “the only industrialized nation without a national paid parental leave program and only one of eight among all 193 states in the United Nations. The others, as of 2014, are Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and five tiny Pacific Island countries: the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Tonga. Currently, the US requires employers to offer only unpaid leave to full-time workers, a policy it shares with New Guinea.”
It would be funded through the existing unemployment insurance system at a cost of approximately $25 billion over the next ten years. Time Magazine said that White House officials estimated 1.3 billion people would benefit from paid family leave, “which would have no income limit, though high earners would have a capped benefit.”
The program would be implemented and run by individual states, not the federal government. Fortune reported that “only three states—New Jersey, Rhode Island, and California—already have such programs in place. New York and Washington, D.C. have approved plans to roll out their own programs next year.”
The administration believes this approach offers flexibility, but it could create state-by-state discrepancies that adversely affect employers and employees.
Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, told The Guardian that “A paid leave plan that continues the current state-by-state patchwork, only provides six weeks of leave when we have a clearly established 12-week national standard, guarantees leave only for new parents and is not funded responsibly would do more harm than good.”
It’s unlikely that the budget will pass, which could leave paid family leave by the wayside. “Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have suggested the plans will make little headway in Congress,” The Financial Times said.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, wrote in a statement: “We should ignore the president’s budget, which would devastate the middle class, and instead work across the aisle to advance reasonable, compromise legislation later this year.”
“This budget is dead before arrival, so he [Trump] might as well be out of town,” agreed David A. Stockman, a former budget director under President Ronald Reagan, in a New York Times article.
Paid family leave is a step in the right direction, but the overall budget will almost certainly be changed as it moves through congress, budget committees, and appropriations subcommittees.
Don’t expect federally mandated, state-funded family leave anytime soon.
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