America is failing infants and families

Iwas one of the privileged few in America able to cobble together almost 12 weeks of paid maternity leave — precious time that let me care for my son, breastfeed and recover from the brutal cocktail of postpartum hormones playing with a woman’s mental health.

I can’t imagine having had to go back after six weeks or, God bless the women who do, two weeks, when infants are unable to smile, support their own heads or even focus their eyes on far away objects.

Only 12 percent of private employers offer paid family and medical leave policies, often through short-term disability insurance, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Those plans typically cover six weeks of partial pay for qualifying events, including personal or family sickness, pregnancy or childbirth.

Sick leave, vacation time, disability insurance, and savings are a glorious luxury not available to many American workers. The heartache mothers and fathers feel is real when they leave their 6-week-old in day care, or have to leave a premature baby, alone, in the neonatal intensive care unit not knowing if their baby will still be alive after work. Babies’ health outcomes are better when their mothers are near, and the first six months of life are crucial in so many ways.

As a society we should all agree the current system is woefully inadequate for parents and babies.

Rep. Faith Winter, D-Westminster, and several of her Democratic colleagues in the Colorado General Assembly are looking for a way to fill the gap left by unpaid family and medical leave.

Winter’s proposal is an appealingly simple idea: every worker pays 0.5 percent of their income into a state-run program that provides up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for a qualifying birth or illness once a year.

Sadly, and with great personal consternation, I’m skeptical such a plan is the right route for Colorado.

There’s no doubt in my mind, however, that the state or the nation needs to find a way to pay for some or all of the 12 weeks of leave provided under President Bill Clinton’s 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act.

So how could we provide what is an expensive benefit to all Americans?

In California, the state’s Disability Insurance Fund paid out $5.4 billion in 2015 to those unable to work because of pregnancy, child birth or a non-work-related illness or injury. The fund covers 18.1 million California workers, and is funded by a 0.9 percent tax on all employees. That tax fluctuates under a formula to ensure the system remains fully funded.

Winter is proposing something similar for Colorado.

Another option would be to go the route of Washington, D.C., which in December passed a $250 million payroll tax on employers to fund family and medical leave. Business leaders in the nation’s capital actually lobbied for an employer mandate instead, taking out a full-page ad in The Washington Post.

That option — an employer mandate — is how this nation has addressed workers’ compensation.

America has collectively decided that workers should continue to get paid if they are injured on the job. Every state in the nation (with one or two caveats) mandates employers carry workers’ compensation insurance.

Some states have systems that work better than others, and the requirement can be a hugely expensive mandate. In Colorado, rates are relatively low. That solution is tempting.

One thing is certain — the solution doesn’t appear likely at the federal level, even with Ivanka Trump championing the issue.

According to the World Policy Analysis Center at UCLA, of the 193 countries in the United Nations, only a handful don’t offer paid maternity leave. Most countries offer the benefit as part of their social security tax programs. But America’s Social Security tax isn’t even funding the existing retirement benefits that have been promised (and in many other countries, neither are theirs).

In Colorado, now is likely not the time to implement a sweeping paid family and medical leave reform. Voters just increased the state minimum wage, and lawmakers are considering asking for a hefty sales tax increase for roads.

But how much longer are we going to wait before we start ensuring that women in our workforce get the support they need and the next generation gets the best start possible during the critical first six-month window of human growth and development?