On their best behavior
States show models of paid family leave
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - As the two leading presidential candidates tout competing campaign proposals to provide paid leave to care for a baby, the three states that already have such programs show how it could work.
The proposals from Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump are significantly different in how they’d be funded and whom they’d help. But they have a clear precedent: not just the dozens of other rich countries that guarantee time off to care for a child or a sick family member, but also California, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
“It’s working fine in all three states,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work who has studied the effects and said the benefits are greatest for lowerincome workers who don’t get any paid time off.
California pioneered paid family leave in 2004, followed by New Jersey in 2009 and Rhode Island in 2014. New York will have the nation’s most generous program when it is launched in 2018, and many states are considering similar laws that pay for the benefits in the same way they pay for disability insurance.
Leave for fathers
Fathers, who would be excluded from Trump’s maternity leave program, are increasingly signing up for plans in the three states that allow paid family leave.
“A lot of moms can get stressed out with a newborn child,” said Ryan Smith, of Cranston, Rhode Island, who took two weeks of state-paid leave this year to bond with his newborn daughter. “When there are two parents there, it’s definitely better than one.”
Of Rhode Island parents who have taken leave so far this year to care for a new child, 37 percent are men, the highest rate of the three states.
California has seen the rate of men participating rise from 17 percent in its first year to nearly 36 percent of the 250,000 parents who took it in the most recent fiscal year. New Jersey lags in participating fathers, with about 13 percent. In all three states, fathers are also less likely than mothers to take the full amount of paid leave allowed.
A popular program
Rhode Island was the first state to guarantee disability leave in 1942, and the caregiving leave adopted in 2014 relies on the same pool of money that covers disability insurance. It’s funded through employee payroll deductions.
Business groups still opposed it because private-sector workers must pay into the fund even when their employers offer their own paid leave. But a survey of Rhode Island employers conducted by Waldfogel and other researchers last year found that a majority supported the new law.
Smith said that both he and his wife took Rhode Island’s paid leave when their second daughter, Eden, was born in late March, and that they combined it with vacation. His employer, a bank, was so supportive that it filled in the gap of what the state program didn’t cover, he said. The state-funded leave pays 60 percent of a person’s salary for up to four weeks.