Family Leave Policy: We’re Dead Last
The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), signed into law by President Clinton in 1993, was considered a significant piece of legislation. For the first time in the United States public agencies and private companies with fifty or more employees were required to provide for their workers up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave, along with continued health care coverage, for the birth or adoption of a child, to care for an opposite-sex spouse, a parent, a sick child, or for the workers themselves. However, the FMLA did not cover about 40 percent of the workforce, particularly those who worked for companies with fewer than fifty employees or they had not worked long enough, 1,250 hours, during the previous year. FMLA was supposed to be a first step; but, from the federal policy perspective, it was the last.
Twenty-one years later, in a June 2014 radio address, President Obama lamented that “Only three countries in the world report that they don’t offer paid maternity leave. Three. And the United States is one of them. It’s time to change that. A few states have acted on their own to give workers paid family leave, but this should be available to everyone, because all Americans should be able to afford to care for a family member in need.” The two other countries? Oman and Papua New Guinea. But there has been no revamping of the Family and Medical Leave Act, no effort by Congress to address the need until early in the Biden administration. In 2021, a deeply divided Congress was considering a Democratic Party family leave plan that gave twelve weeks of paid coverage. The proposal faced opposition from Democrats Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kirsten Sinema (Arizona) along with unified obstruction from Republican lawmakers.
Family Leave throughout the World: According to the World Policy Analysis Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, the average paid maternity leave throughout the world in 2019 was twenty-nine weeks, while the average paid paternity leave was sixteen weeks.
Of the 186 countries offering leave for new mothers, just one country (Eswatini, formerly called Swaziland), offered less than four weeks; of the 174 countries offering leave for personal health concerns, just twenty-six offered four weeks or less.
Sources: Tara Siegel Bernard, “In Paid Family Leave, U.S. Trails Most of the Globe,” New York Times, February 22, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/your-money/us-trails-much-of-the-world-in-providing-paid-family-leave.html; Barack Obama, “Bringing Our Workplace Policies into the Twenty-first Century,” The White House, June 21, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/06/21/weekly-address-bringing-our-workplace-policies-21st-century; Claire Cain Miller, “The World ‘Has Found a Way to Do This’: The US Lags on Paid Leave,” New York Times, November 3, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/upshot/paid-leave-democrats.html; World Policy Analysis Center, Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA, https://ph.ucla.edu/faculty-research/centers-programs/world-policy-analysis-center.
