Twenty-one years ago, Gayle Goldin was standing on a balcony when it collapsed in an accident that broke her back. But despite a difficult recovery, the physical pain was made worse by worry about lost wages and an ever-increasing mountain of bills.
As weeks of rehab became months, Goldin was unable to work, and turned to the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which had passed Congress in 1993. Unfortunately, it proved less helpful than Goldin had expected.
Although the act provided up to twelve weeks of leave to workers who were recovering from an illness or accident, had just given birth or adopted a child, or needed to care for an immediate family member, the allowed leave was unpaid. Not only that, it was restricted to employees of public agencies or companies with fifty or more workers within a seventy-five-mile radius. It further required employees to have logged at least 1,250 working hours in the previous twelve months. Part-time and seasonal workers, as well as new hires, were excluded, and workers could not use the FMLA to attend to domestic partners, or relatives including adult children, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, or nephews.
These barriers outraged Goldin, and as she healed, she began to reach out to activist groups in her Rhode Island community. The goal was getting the state to provide paid family and medical leave for all workers.
“Fairly quickly we got the legislature to pull together a task force that created a small benefit for adoptive families,” Goldin tells The Progressive. “Rhode Island residents who gave birth were able to receive short-term financial help through the state’s Temporary Disability Insurance program, but the law left adoptive parents out. The legislature rectified this by giving adopters a tax credit. It was a tiny thing.”
Still, it was a start, and the victory led to widespread interest in winning paid leave. By 2011, Goldin’s efforts had picked up speed, and a coalition organized by the Women’s Fund of Rhode Island brought an array of groups together to push for a state FMLA. A year later, Goldin ran for state senate on a platform focusing on this issue. She was elected and quickly made good on her promise, introducing a bill to expand workplace benefits during her first year in office. The effort succeeded, and Rhode Island became the third state to provide paid medical and family leave. Rhode Island workers with Temporary Caregiver Insurance can currently receive four weeks off at 60 percent of their normal salary. Last year, 7,031 people—three-quarters of them new parents—made use of this benefit.
A decade later, the number of states with paid family and medical leave has risen to eleven: In addition to Rhode Island, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington State now provide benefits, or will soon do so. The provisions vary, however, ranging from five to twenty-six weeks of leave. Benefit levels fluctuate as well.
COVID-19 has given this legal patchwork—as well as the reality that just sixteen states mandate paid sick days for short-term illnesses—renewed attention. And although the pandemic pushed Congress to enact the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in 2020—a law which required employers (in exchange for tax credits) to provide up to eighty paid hours off at full salary if workers were quarantined or ill with COVID-19, and at two-thirds their pay if they were caring for other household members—it was allowed to expire at the end of 2020.
This, activists say, was not the only time that Congress bungled the chance to expand the social safety net. “Paid family leave was part of President Biden’s Build Back Better Bill, but it did not become a reality,” Sherry Leiwant, co-president and co-founder of A Better Balance, an advocacy organization working to advance economic justice for workers, tells The Progressive. “Obviously, this was extremely disappointing.”
Paid family and medical leave is an issue that straddles both economic and gender justice, according to Leiwant. “Part of the problem is that largely male lawmakers perceive caretaking as a women’s issue,” she says. “It is women who tend to take leave to care for new babies or family members who become ill. But polling shows that paid leave is incredibly popular with people of every gender and race, and in every part of the country. It is not a partisan issue.”
“We have reams of evidence to show that paid leave does not have a negative impact on small companies.”
So why has it gotten so little traction? “Maybe legislators see other issues as more important,” Leiwant posits. Or perhaps members of Congress prefer it to be organized on a state-by-state basis.
Vasu Reddy, senior policy counsel for economic justice at the National Partnership for Women and Families, says that opponents of paid leave include big businesses, trade associations, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “These groups continue to say that paid leave will be a burden on small businesses, but it’s not true,” she says. “We have reams of evidence to show that paid leave does not have a negative impact on small companies. Every state that has passed it has seen reduced worker turnover and less need to recruit and train new personnel. In fact, a recent survey found that at least 70 percent of small business owners support paid family and medical leave.”
Hiding behind bogus claims about business efficacy, Reddy adds, is a way for many legislative opponents to avoid owning their general antipathy to government regulation. But the emergence of long COVID may force a reckoning on this, she says. A recent report from the Brookings Institute, released in late August, revealed that approximately sixteen million U.S. residents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five have long COVID, which is defined as having symptoms persisting at least three months past the initial diagnosis.
“Currently, 27 percent of private-sector workers in the United States (around thirty million people) lack access to any form of paid sick leave,” the report states. Among the lowest wage earners—largely people of color—more than half lose money if they don’t show up for work.
“It should not depend on where you live or who you work for to get benefits,” Reddy says. “Every worker should be able to take care of themselves or their family members without destroying their finances if they become too ill to work.”
Alexander G., an advertising professional who asked that his last name not be used, knows firsthand how important paid leave can be. At the same time, he says that stigma regarding illness—whether physical or psychological—can make taking time off problematic.
“I had a series of concussions between 2018 and 2020,” he explains, “and the doctors I saw after the first injury did not tell me what I should do to heal. I did not know how seriously I’d been hurt, so I went back to work the next day. I was regularly doing twelve-hour shifts. Over the next two years, I had two additional concussions, but I did not apply for leave until the symptoms—blurred vision, balance problems, brain fog, and extreme fatigue—became so bad that my performance at work began to suffer.”
Alexander then approached his supervisor and took two weeks off at 100 percent of his salary. “I’m lucky,” he tells The Progressive. “My manager is understanding, but I still worried. I’m young, thirty-one, and as a queer person of color, I already felt that there was bias against me. This made me reluctant to take time off, as it could give the higher-ups a reason to doubt my abilities.”
Alexander’s concerns are not unusual, labor advocates say, and they underscore the necessity of universal paid family and medical leave. Provision of these benefits, they add, will also bring the United States into line with the rest of the world. Currently, the United States, Papua New Guinea, and a handful of other Pacific Island nations are the only United Nations member countries that deny paid family leave to working people.
That said, advocates concede that paid family and medical leave is unlikely to become federal law anytime soon, which is why they’re focused on the upcoming November midterm elections. The need to elect people who support paid leave at the state, local, and federal levels is paramount. “Paradoxically, the states that are quickest to restrict abortion are also the states that are most resistant to enacting paid leave,” Leiwant says. “This is why we need federal protections, so that everyone gets the same access to benefits.”
Reddy agrees. Coalitions led by unions, health care activists, people with long COVID, and social welfare proponents “aren’t giving up or going away,” she says, and will continue pushing for robust, paid leave at the federal level.
“The market has shown that it will not do what is needed to protect and support workers,” she adds. “We need federal mandates and we will continue to gather evidence, organize, and testify about the many ways that paid leave benefits everyone.”