Paid Leave for New York Families: We need time to care Center for Working Families

Families have changed dramatically over recent decades, but employment practices have not kept pace. Today, most parents of young children – mothers as well as fathers – work, and an increasing number of us are also responsible for elderly or disabled relatives. With no paid leave policies in place, new parents must return to work before they or their children are ready. And when a crisis arrives, and working people must take time off to care for family members, they must also forgo their paychecks, often at the very time they can least afford it.

The hardship is the greatest for low and moderate-income families who have the least savings to draw on, and are the least likely to have access to employer provided paid leave. Caring for children, or for sick family members in need, should not be a luxury only some people can afford.

New York should help working families by following California’s example and establishing a program of Paid Family Leave. The program could be administered through the existing Temporary Disability Insurance system and funded like TDI for a very modest cost.

A growing number of working people are responsible for children, aging parents or other relatives. Working parents have a tremendous need for paid family leave. Two-thirds (67 percent) of women with children under 18, and a majority (53 percent) of women with children under 3, are employed. Care for elderly relatives is also an increasingly common responsibility for working people. According to a recent national survey, 21 percent of the adult population also regularly provides care to another adult.

Few workers can afford to take unpaid time off from work. Nationally, only 8 percent of workers have access to paid family leave. For the vast majority of Americans, caring for a new child or sick relative means foregoing wages, something that few families can afford for long.

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act recognized the need for time off to deal with family care, and granted workers in larger businesses the right to take up to 12 weeks for the birth or adoption of a child or to care for a sick family member. Because the leave is unpaid, however, many of the working people who most need it simply cannot afford to take time off. According to the US Department of Labor, 78 percent of people who said they needed family leave in 2000, and were eligible for it under FMLA, couldn't afford to take it.

There is no program currently in place to provide income stability to employees who leave work temporarily due to family needs. Existing safety-net programs, such as Unemployment Insurance, were designed in a period when it was expected that men would be the main breadwinners, and women would be available for unpaid care for family members. As a result, these programs generally fail to provide for interruptions to employment due to family responsibilities.

California created its system of Paid Family Leave by expanding its existing Temporary Disability Insurance program. A similar approach makes sense for New York. Using the existing system to collect contributions and administer the program will minimize administrative costs.

New York’s current system of Temporary Disability Insurance provides 50% of a claimant's average weekly wage, up to a maximum of $170 a week, for periods up to 26 weeks. A system expanded to cover family needs, along the lines of the bill passed by the Assembly in 2005 (A1301) would in addition:

• Cover both “parental leave” for either parent to care for newborns or newly adopted children, and “family medical leave” to care for seriously ill family members, including children, spouses, siblings, domestic partners, parents, grandparents or in-laws.
• Provide family leave benefits for a maximum of 12 weeks per year.
• Be funded similarly to the existing TDI program.

At the current TDI benefit level, adding such a Paid Family Leave benefit to cover family members as defined under FMLA (spouse, parent, child) would cost only approximately $14 per covered worker annually, or 27 cents a week. Covering some additional family members to reflect the composition of our households would add only marginally to the cost.

The California family leave program covers up to 6 weeks of paid family leave, at much higher benefit levels (maximum benefits are $840 a week) and costs approximately $27 per worker a year. Even if benefit levels in New York were doubled or tripled - which they should be – the cost would remain extremely modest.