Sly James: Paid family leave is a lifeline for new parents, and a boon to business
There’s nothing quite like stress to reveal cracks in the system. For automakers, stress tests are deliberate — demolishing a perfectly good vehicle in an intentional crash. Under controlled conditions, these provide loads of data to improve the product and prevent failure in the real world. Tragic, real-world failures also provide helpful data. In commercial aviation, crashes are exceedingly rare — thank goodness. But when they happen, the data are analyzed in detail and used to prevent future calamities. That’s why there are so few airline accidents.
Today, we’re not in a planned crash test. With the pandemic and resulting recession, the plane went down, and we’re staring at all the pieces.
One of the biggest pieces, tragically, is the state of families about to have children. If they’re still employed with a baby on the way, many families face a terrible choice. They can resume working at the cost of their child’s most important, formative stage of life, or they can forfeit their jobs (and their financial viability and its benefit to the economy) for the sake of their child.
The situation was already bad before the crash. Out of 41 countries analyzed by Pew Research last year, only the U.S. lacks mandated, paid family leave following a birth or adoption. But now, in the wake of the pandemic, the crisis is even more acute. The absence of paid leave threatens the prospect of economic recovery for all of us, especially those struggling to get out of poverty and achieve a middle-class dream.
It all starts at birth. Multiple studies in both red states and blue have shown that paid family leave has enormous, long-term benefits. It builds and sustains overall economic growth and stability, not just for individual families.
Republicans often complain that paid family leave is a boondoggle or a “free lunch” that businesses can’t afford and shouldn’t be forced to pay. Sometimes, Democrats play into their hands by calling it an entitlement, while arguing that decent, humane people simply ought to provide for our fellow Americans. The truth is that they’re both having the wrong discussion. As moral as it might be to support good parenting, the fact is that paid family leave is good for the economy — period.
In 2016, as mayor of Kansas City, I had the privilege of creating a parental leave program that provided city employees with six to eight weeks of paid parental leave. At first, local businesses were wary, to say the least. But soon, it became clear that the benefits far outweighed the costs. Starting with waves of gratitude that lasted well beyond the leave period, good employees became better ones — which was great for the city. Local employers began to follow suit, and their overall productivity increased. Paid leave was simply good for business.
Paid family leave is not an easy solution, but it’s the right one. It’s true that not every business today can afford it. But the ones that can — the Googles of the world — know what it does for productivity, employee gratitude and the bottom line. But these benefits should not be limited to big companies. With the cooperation of government and business, funding these programs can help small companies thrive and grow to be big ones.
The newly minted Democratic presidential ticket has come out forcefully for a paid family leave policy to replace our current “none of the above” fiasco. Joe Biden’s “Plan for Mobilizing American Talent” advocates for 12 weeks of paid family leave. Last year, Sen. Kamala Harris proposed her “Children’s Agenda,” which would guarantee up to six months.
Whatever the final number is, both candidates recognize the economic value of joining the civilized world — and the political opportunity it represents. Such a policy would draw millions of working middle-class families to consider aligning themselves with the Democrats this November, and for the foreseeable future.
No one in the Democratic Party disputes the urgency of this year’s election, but we also need to think bigger, beyond the stale ideas of the past. What really matters are the issues of importance to the forgotten, hardworking, middle class families of this country. Without a doubt, paid family leave is one of those issues.
Sly James is former mayor of Kansas City and co-author of The Opportunity Agenda.
This story was originally published September 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Sly James: Paid family leave is a lifeline for new parents, and a boon to business."