Family Leave: A Step Toward Sanity

I hate to say “I told you so.” After all, most of the time, a simple “Nyaah, nyaah” will do the trick. But today I feel like trilling James Carville’s book title: “We’re Right, They’re Wrong.”

What brings about this attack of gloating is a report just released on the Family and Medical Leave Act, the law passed during the first hopeful weeks of the Clinton administration. It’s the law that guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to full-time workers in companies with 50 or more employees who need to care for their parents, their spouses, their newborn or newly adopted children, their sick children or themselves.

In a rare moment of sanity, Congress decided to actually study the effects of a law that it passed. Now a commission consisting of friends and enemies of family and medical leave has found that the law is helping millions of Americans balance family and work without burdening business.

In better times, this would deserve a “ho-hum,” or a modest “of course” rather than a full-throated gloat. But it took a decade to win this teeny-weeny piece of pro-family legislation. FMLA was introduced to five Congresses, subject to 17 hearings, and voted on 13 times before it became law.

The bill’s opponents swore up and down that it would (1) hurt our ability to compete in the global economy, (2) take away our personal freedom, (3)force business to scale back other benefits and (4) bring economic ruination down on the heads of patriotic Americans everywhere.

My personal favorite attack was by conservatives who warned dourly that a maternity leave policy would hurt young (and fertile) women the most because employers wouldn’t hire them. This deep concern was uttered by senators who had no previous record of deep concern about working women. Let’s just say, there was a first time for everything.

None of these warnings was even as accurate as a weather report. In FMLA’s first year and a half somewhere between 1.5 million and 3 million Americans took leave for a median of 10 days. Of these, some 59 percent took leave for their own illnesses (not including maternity). Another 25 percent of the leaves were for the birth, adoption or serious illness of a child. Ten percent for seriously ill parents or spouses.

Of the businesses surveyed, somewhere between 89 percent and 98 percent reported either small or no extra costs. Indeed, they painted “an overall picture of enhanced employee productivity, good will and willingness to ‘go the extra mile’ … “

Well, I told you so.

But here is where the gloating ends. The Family and Medical Leave Act was always, well, a bit wimpy.

It covers only companies with 50 or more workers. That’s 10 percent of the work sites and half the workers. It covers only full-time workers. And it’s unpaid. The biggest reason workers don’t take leave is that they can’t afford it. One of eight women who took leave for maternity needed public assistance.

Donna Lenhoff of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, who originally proposed the leave, says, “We needed to show that the sky was not going to fall in order to begin to build a case for more benefits.” Now, the sky seems to be holding. It’s the family that’s still collapsing.

The bare-bottom, barrel-scraping minimum that Americans need is some help in a health crisis. That means expanding leave coverage to smaller work sites and to part-time workers. Then, as the commission report suggests in the most cautious terms, it’s time to begin to start to think about wage replacement. We can follow the lead of states that cover maternity, for example, under temporary disability insurance.

Will this take another 10 years?

I’m now in my third decade of working Mother’s Days. I have this feeling that when I’m a working grandmother, I’ll be listening to politicians talking about the dire economic consequences of familyfriendly policies. And then turning around and lecturing about the need for personal responsibility.

If Americans are so fearful about jobs that we can’t stop to take care of a sick child - or have a child - then we’ve already slid down the greased pole of the “new world economy.”

The commission report on the first baby steps of family policy points to another way. Economic values and family values are not irreconcilable. Forget what they say. Remember I told you so.

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