It seems like common sense: your daughter gets sick or your spouse is injured, so you take time off work to care for them.
Except it’s not so common anymore, as the White House Summit on Working Families showed. In many cases, workers don’t have paid sick leave at all – and can’t afford to take unpaid time off. Other workers have been fired for taking even unpaid time off to care for their families, care for a newborn or take care of an illness, whether it’s the flu or cancer.
Lawmakers in Washington state, and other states, have been working the issue.
President Barack Obama summed up the problem like this:
“A lot of jobs do not offer it. So when a new baby arrives or an aging parent gets sick, workers have to make painful decisions about whether they can afford to be there when their families need them the most. Many women can’t even get a paid day off to give birth. Now, that’s a pretty low bar. For many hourly workers, taking just a few days off can mean losing their job. And even though unpaid family leave is available, if you can’t pay the bills already the idea of taking a couple days off unpaid may mean you can’t make the mortgage payment or the rent payment at the end of the month.”
See this NCSL story for a comparison of state and federal laws on family leave.
Earlier in his weekly radio address, Obama said, “Only three countries in the world report that they don’t offer paid maternity leave – three – and the United States is one of them. It’s time to change that. A few states have acted on their own to give workers paid family leave, but this should be available to everyone, because all Americans should be able to afford to care for a family member in need.”
Washington state’s Family Leave Act goes further than federal law and covers all employees who’ve worked at least 680 hours in the year, with up to 12 weeks of unpaid family leave allowed per year for the birth of a child, the placement of a child for adoption or foster care or to take care of a serious health problem in the family. The Family Care Act allows workers to use paid sick leave or other paid time off to care for a sick child, an adult child with a disability or a family member with a serious or emergency health condition.