While there are companies that offer maternity leave for women in the form of Family Medical Leave or short-term disability, there is still a large number of women who must take an unpaid leave after giving birth. There is a possibility this could change.
The “Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act” or FAMILY Act, proposed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) earlier this month, looks to create an independent, self-sustaining trust fund that would come from payroll contribution of employees and employers equaling an amount of 2-percent of wages.
The FAMILY Act would cover the following among others:
- For example, the average working female earning the median weekly wage would only need to contribute $1.38 per week. Even the highest wage earners would have a maximum contribution of $4.36 per week.
- Cover workers in all companies, no matter their size. Younger, part-time, lower-wage and contingent workers would be eligible for benefits.
- Be administered through a trust fund through the Social Security Administration enabling the program to capitalize on numerous administrative efficiencies and decrease the need to create new bureaucracies.
Sen. Gillibrand, in an editorial published on New York Daily News, references a recent report from Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress citing that only 12-percent of workers in the United States have access to paid family leave through their job. Forty-percent of workers have access to personal medical leave through employer-provided short-term disability insurance. According to The Telegram, the U.S. is the only industrialized, wealthy nation that does not require paid medical or family leave.
“Employees would earn the leave as they pay into it and could use it once a year,” Gillibrand said. When a young parent needs time to care for a newborn child, it should never come down to an outdated policy that lets her boss decide how long it will take.”
Learn more about the proposed legislation via Sen. Gillibrand’s political site.
BMWK–What are your thoughts on the proposed act? Could this be beneficial on a nationwide basis?
Roni Faida says
This is normal in Europe and I don’t understand why we don’t have it here. One of my friends was off work for a year and was paid the whole time, she lives in Paris. Our country is great but so backwards on so many issues.
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