paid family leave
lborkowski | February 7, 2017Twenty-four years ago, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Family and Medical Leave Act. The FMLA has allowed millions of workers to take time off work to care for new children and seriously ill family members, but it has several shortcomings and was only intended to be a first step. But over the past 24 years, US policy has stagnated while most of the rest of the world has demonstrated how well common-sense paid leave policies can function. Today, members of Congress have re-introduced legislation that would help us catch up.
The FMLA’s two most important shortcomings are allowing…
lborkowski | April 7, 2016New York State's new budget deal includes a paid-leave program that will offer the most paid leave in the nation once it's fully implemented in 2021. California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have already established programs that partially replace workers' salaries when they take time off work to care for a new child or family member with a serious health condition, or to address their own disabling condition. These programs allow for a maximum of four weeks (Rhode Island) or six weeks (California and New Jersey) for family care; New York will allow for up to 12 weeks.
Like the other states,…
lborkowski | September 21, 2015Last week, 203 business-school faculty members from 88 institutions across the US wrote an open letter to members of Congress stating, "It is time to ensure that the entire United States workforce has access to paid family and medical leave." The signatories urge our legislators to consider the Family and Medical Leave Insurance Act (FAMILY Act) as one solution. This bill, which I wrote about here when it was first introduced, would use a payroll tax of two-tenths of one percent to fund a "social insurance" system that would allow all workers to take up to 12 partially paid weeks off work to…
lborkowski | October 2, 2014Last month, when California Governor Jerry Brown signed the Health Workplaces, Healthy Families Act of 2014 into law, he made his state the second in the nation with a law mandating paid sick days. In 2011, Connecticut became the first state to require that employers let workers earn and use paid sick time – although, it only applies to businesses with 50 or more employees. California’s new law, which takes effect July 1, 2015, exempts some classes of workers but otherwise applies to all employers with at least one employee.
In November, Massachusetts voters will decide whether to add their…