New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
We need 12 weeks of paid leave now
When a beloved mother-inlaw needs care after surgery, what do you do? You and your husband move from Michigan to Indiana to care for her, even if it means losing your job. That happened to one of us.
When you have ovarian cancer, and the doctor says you need treatment immediately, what do you do? If you are lucky, you have a boss who says, “Take as much time as you need. Your job will be waiting for you.” That happened to the other of us.
In the richest country in the world, having time to heal or provide care without falling off a financial cliff should not be a matter of luck. It should be a basic right for every working person.
We both know this firsthand. Nija had no paid family leave and a mother-in-law in another state who urgently needed care — causing Nija and her husband to lose their jobs and go into debt.
As for me, when I was struggling with ovarian cancer, I won the boss lottery — thanks to the paid family and medical leave arranged by my then-boss, Sen. Chris Dodd. Only due to the grace of God and biomedical research did I recover, and I have been cancer-free for more than 30 years. Both of us became champions for the passage of a meaningful paid family and medical leave policy at the national level.
The urgency and demand have only increased over the past 18 months. The pandemic made abundantly clear how interdependent our lives are and how unprepared we were to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
What working people want is simple: to care for and provide for ourselves and our loved ones. That care will be possible only with a permanent, sustainable paid family and medical leave policy. Federal paid family and medical leave builds on decades of successful statewide programs like the one that will start in Connecticut next year. We need Congress to act on a policy.
We have reams of evidence that paid family and medical leave works. During the pandemic, COVID cases and death went down when people had access to paid family and medical leave. Even before the pandemic, access to paid family and medical leave led to better health outcomes, higher rates of breastfeeding among new mothers, and stronger attachment to the workforce.
We know paid family and medical leave saves jobs and lives. Right now, working families lose $22.5 billion in wages each year because of a lack of paid family and medical leave. Millions also lose their jobs. That leads to higher unemployment, higher rates of hospitalization, higher health care costs and decreased spending, which depresses the economy.
Without paid family and medical leave, families face losses that cannot be put into dollars. How do you quantify the loss of proper healing from childbirth or cancer? How do you quantify the loss of time spent helping a parent recover from a stroke? How do you quantify the loss of time with your newborn baby? Or the inability to be with a loved one in their final hours? Paid family and medical leave makes it possible for people to care for the people they love without losing their jobs or facing eviction and possibly losing their homes.
Having 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave is critically important. Those 12 weeks can be crucial for parents and their children. Imagine telling someone receiving chemotherapy that despite her side effects, she must come back to work after two weeks. Imagine telling a child who is caring for his aging parent at the end of life that he must leave the bedside because he is out of paid time off days. Sadly, this happens to more people than you may realize.
Only 21 percent of workers have access to paid family leave through their employers, and only 40 percent have personal medical leave through an employer-provided temporary disability program. Workers of color are disproportionately among those without access to leave, as are low-paid workers. In fact, 93 percent of low-wage earners have zero access to paid family and medical leave.
According to a recent study, this burden of making an impossible and unfair choice — risking losing your job to care for loved ones or heal yourself — falls more often on women, especially women of color, who are overrepresented in lower paid jobs and often responsible for providing care at home. They are less likely to have paid family and medical leave or to afford paid care or taking unpaid time off to provide care themselves.
Over the next few weeks, we have the best opportunity to ensure that everyone has the time to care for the people they love. We can create an affordable and accessible program that covers all workers for 12 weeks by making sure the wealthiest individuals and corporations pay their fair share.
We should all have zero tolerance for zero weeks of paid family and medical leave. That is why I have been drafting paid family and medical leave legislation since 2010. We need to finally bring paid family and medical leave across the finish line. Now is the time to take this once-in-a-generation opportunity and make it happen. This moment will not come again.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro represents Connecticut’s Third Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives and is the author of the first paid family and medical leave bill, which was introduced in 2013. Nija Phelps is a member of the Voices of Workers group of the Paid Leave for All campaign representing Connecticut Women's Education and Legal Fund.