Paid leave policies must include chosen family

  The United States’ lack of any permanent, national paid leave policy makes it the sole outlier among industrialized countries and puts workers’ jobs, economic security, and health at risk—as well as the growth of the nation’s economy overall. And while these negative impacts are felt across the country, this policy gap has affected LGBTQI+ individuals, who often have less access to care from traditional family structures, in particular ways.

How Biden’s paid leave proposal would benefit workers, their families and their employers too

  The Biden administration is proposing a massive expansion of federal benefits through a 10-year US$1.8 trillion package that includes new spending on child care, the continuation of the expanded child tax credit, and more robust nutrition programs. Notably, it would introduce a new federal paid family leave benefit costing an estimated $225 billion over the next decade. If it is fully phased in as proposed, workers could get up to $4,000 a month for a total of 12 weeks in paid leave to care for a newborn, another loved one or themselves.

  The Conversation U.S. asked Joya Misra, a sociologist who studies how public policies influence inequality, four questions about paid leave in the U.S.

Paid Leave 101

  Every day, millions of Americans are forced to juggle work and family responsibilities. At the same time, U.S. policies have not kept pace with the needs of modern workers. Without family-friendly workplace policies such as paid sick days and paid family and medical leave, employees often find achieving a work-life balance to be a herculean task—and in many cases, a myth. Employees deserve protections that enable them to take care of themselves and their families as they strive to do their best work for their employers.

Rhetoric vs. Reality: Paid family and medical leave

  Access to comprehensive paid family and medical leave strengthens all American families because everyone potentially needs to take off from work at some point to recover from an illness, care for a family member, or welcome a new child. But the United States is the world’s only advanced economy that does not guarantee some form of paid leave for workers. The result is that only 12 percent of private-sector workers in the United States have paid family and medical leave. In most American families, all the parents in the home are employed, meaning there is no full-time stay-at-home caregiver, and the majority of American families rely on a female breadwinner or co-breadwinner. Paid family and medical leave policies are already working across the United States, as cities, states, and individual employers embrace them. But without a national solution, millions of workers and their families are left out.