2.3 - The First (and Only) State with Paid Family Leave

Christine, a California resident and the sole wage earner in her household, is having a less stressful experience with new parenthood.

At 7:59 A.M. on May 15, 2004, a newborn cry of life pierced a hospital room in San Francisco, California, and Christine became a mother at thirty-three years old: “I was pretty stunned how quickly it all happened.”

Just the day before, Christine had closed the office-building door behind her as she left work at 5 P.M. She thought she had at least three weeks until her baby arrived.

She met her husband for an early evening beach walk along a stone path looking down to a sandy shore—a regular walk for them. The only difference she noticed was that she felt more tired than usual, barely making it two hundred yards down the path before turning back.

They left the beach for an Italian restaurant and Christine remembers relishing the pasta as only someone who’s eaten for two can understand.

Sometime in the middle of the night her water broke. It was a trickle more than a flood, so Christine waited to call her doctor until the morning. After making an 11 A.M. appointment, she called in sick to work. Her husband picked up “the bag,” an accessory Christine thought unnecessary, since her due date was more than three weeks away.

She was wrong. “The doctor took one look at me and sent me right across the street to have a baby,” recalls Christine. The doctor’s office was next to a big red brick hospital, the same one in which Christine was born. And after getting settled into her cozy peach-colored hospital room, complete with comfy chairs and big picture window, Liam was born without complications.

But Christina’s journey into motherhood hadn’t started with as few complications as her son’s delivery. At one point she found herself thirty-two, pregnant, with a husband who had just been laid off. There were points of sheer panic along the way.

Several months earlier, newly wearing maternity clothes, Christine had pushed up from her desk in northern California and taken a short walk down a corridor of cubicles. She’d requested a meeting with the Human Resources Director at her work, and now it was time to sit down face to face.

Fortunately, the Human Resources Director was among the few with an office door that actually closed in the 150-plus company. It could be a private conversation.

“I reached the physical and emotional point where I needed to face the reality of a new baby and get some answers,” says Christine, noting she was starting to feel pretty big and unwieldy. The pressure was on because Christine was the sole wage earner, and, as such, her job provided health insurance and other benefits for the entire family.

In a small neutral-colored office, amidst piles of stacked papers and a general feeling of corporate sterility, Christine’s options were laid out with graphs and charts. First, she found out her company, like many others, didn’t even have a maternity policy. In fact, very few companies do have family leave policies. “A survey of personnel managers, conducted in 2000, found that just 12 percent of companies offered paid maternity leave and just seven percent offered paid paternity leave,” notes a National Partnership for Women and Families report. “Eighty-five percent of respondents reported no maternity or paternity leave benefits.”¹⁹

Sharing what she thought after learning her company didn’t have a family leave policy and that the federal Family and Medical Leave Act didn’t offer monetary support, Christine comments, “I was really naïve and shocked that federal family leave wasn’t paid. I feel like everyone is winging it. It feels like every time family leave time comes up, it’s the first time the company faces it. It’s not like, ‘Oh, this is our policy, and these are your options.’ ”

Luck, Timing, and Organizing. That’s what it took to pass Paid Family Leave in California in 2002; the nation’s most comprehensive paid family leave legislation. Most Californians can now get six weeks of paid family leave benefits through a state disability insurance fund, funded by employee contributions. You never know when the time is right for a paid leave or other campaign so persevere with what you believe in.

Our success followed the outlines of any successful campaign. Advocates built awareness and relationships over time, got support from powerful partners, faced opposition from the business community and succeeded through a combination of grassroots organizing, political pressure, legislative maneuvering, media outreach and compromise.

Key ingredients to our success were:

The labor movement
A well-organized coalition
A strong legislator
Good old fashioned organizing.

Several factors made California fertile ground for a paid family leave campaign. We had an existing infrastructure of other laws and benefits related to paid leave issues; a committed core of advocates with varied areas of expertise; a diverse Coalition of unions and community organizations; the California Labor Federation (state AFL-CIO) which prioritized the issue; research on the low cost of providing a paid family leave benefit; and funding for staff and resources for the campaign.

Though the bill got enormous opposition from the business community, we were able to frame the issue in the press as “caring for families.” The Coalition along with the Labor Federation mobilized thousands of union members and community advocates to send postcards and emails, call legislators, get press coverage and generate public support for paid leave. Other organizations jumped in to offer expertise, from press outreach to web based emails.

As it gained momentum, we were able to get more press because it was the first paid family leave legislation in the country and it resonated with the public as “good for families.” When the bill got to the Governor’s desk, it was an election year and labor drove home the national significance of the decision facing the Governor. We flooded his office will emails, letters and calls from the community as well as from celebrities, national political figures and national labor leaders. The Governor signed the bill on September 23, 2002, a historic day for working families.

—Adapted from “Putting Families First: How California Won the Fight for Paid Family Leave,” www.laborproject.org under publications.

After processing the bad news—the fact that her company didn’t have a maternity policy, and the federal family leave program was unpaid, she felt the good news sink in—she qualified for paid family leave under a new California state law. Christine recalls her feelings at the time, “I was surprised there was so little, and then relieved to hear about the new California paid family leave—since my husband wasn’t working, I was pretty much sick with fear about it for months.”

California is the only state in America with paid family leave, and is one of only five states (along with New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Hawaii) with short-term disability payments that can be used for disability due to pregnancy and childbirth. Both programs in California are paid by employee contributions into a state fund. California’s Paid Family Leave program began July 1, 2004, and employee costs are minimal. For instance, a low-wage worker would pay about $2.25 per month.²⁰ Christine’s son was born with perfect timing to take advantage of the new program.

Between the new California Paid Family Leave program and California short-term physical disability payments, Christine was able to patch together twelve weeks of partial paid leave (six weeks with from the California paid family leave law, and six weeks from California short-term disability payments).

Geographically speaking, Christine was in a good place.

But what if Christine was in one of the other forty-nine states in our nation? She’d be left in the same situation as Selena, having to go right back to work. Or even like Alfreda, using all her paid sick leave, taking out a loan, and then having to go back to work without any banked paid time off. These are not healthy solutions. For example, the repercussions of using all available sick and vacation days can be profound: There won’t be any time off left if the new baby in daycare gets sick. What to do then?

Of the fifty states in our nation, only one has the paid family leave program Christine was able to access. There are two main federal laws that relate to women and childbirth, and neither offers paid leave time: The first is the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which passed in 1978 and made it illegal to discriminate against working women on the basis of pregnancy or childbirth. Prior to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, women were often pushed to leave their jobs when they became pregnant or had a baby. The second main federal law is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which passed in 1993, and grants a female or male employee working at a large company (fifty or more workers) up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave during any twelvemonth period for the following reasons: the birth and care of the newborn child of the employee; placement with the employee of a son or daughter for adoption or foster care; caring for an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition; or taking medical leave when the employee is unable to work because of a serious health condition.

Yet the FMLA doesn’t cover anyone working at a smaller company (less than fifty workers), leaving a huge portion of our population without any federal coverage at all. A mere 46.5 percent of private-sector employees are both covered by and eligible for FMLA due to the eligibility restrictions that limit it to employees of large companies that have worked there at least 1,250 hours per year for at least twelve months.²¹

For those that do qualify for FMLA, during the unpaid leave the parent retains health benefits and his or her job is guaranteed, but the FMLA doesn’t include provisions for paid leave while parents take time out of the workforce. This leaves millions of parents in a financial bind and ultimately unable to take the uncompensated leave the law allows.

Mothers aren’t the only ones who care for family members—and newborns aren’t the only ones needing care. Wisconsin was one of many states where 9to5 helped build broad coalitions to win a new minimum standard of family and medical leave. In February 1988, after Governor Tommy Thompson announced he’d support only 30 days of maternity leave, our coalition escorted a dozen kids to the Capitol. They told their stories to Secretary of Employment Relations, John Tries.

Noah Michaelson was big for a nine-year-old. It was hard to picture him hairless and skinny from cancer four years earlier. The Racine boy recounted how both his parents would accompany him to treatment, one to hold him and one to tell a story while the needle went in. “Operations and tests hurt more when your parents aren’t there,” he said. Noah remembered other children at the hospital who were all alone— he understood now that their parents had to be at work or they’d lose their jobs and their insurance.

Chris Chrisler from DeForest was adopted for the first time at the age of twelve. “I was so happy to finally have a home,” he’d written. Problem was, Chris and his new brothers and sisters had to go to bed by 8:00 P.M. The adoption agency required their mother to be home during the day, but her employer wouldn’t give her leave.

Other children told about losing a grandparent, dealing with a sibling with a developmental disability, struggling with asthma. The last and youngest was my son, Craig Miller, then age seven, who’d once been hit by a car. He had a message for the Governor: “How would you like it if your son was sick and you couldn’t take time off to be with your sick kid?”

“You know,” Tries told them, “we’re so used to dealing with lobbyists, we forget about those who are affected by our legislation.” He thanked the kids and asked if any of them had a question. Craig immediately raised his hand.

“I want to know why wouldn’t the Governor sign this bill?” Tries laughed and promised the Governor would sign some version of family leave.

The kids then held a press conference for legislators and told their stories again—this time adding the Secretary’s promise. Newspaper headlines the next day read, “Young ‘Lobbyists’ Win Lawmakers’ Hearts.”

A few weeks later, the Governor did sign the Wisconsin Family and Medical Leave Act. It was only the second state law to include time for family care, and the first to allow the right for workers to substitute any accrued paid time for the unpaid leave. Later business lobbyists challenged that provision, claiming men were taking time to go fishing and alligator hunting. Oh, no, we said—finally more men can be good fathers, because they’re not being punished for it at work.

—This piece is adapted from her forthcoming book, Taking on the Big Boys: Reflections from the Feminist Trenches.

The ability for parents to take leave without fear of losing their job is important. That said, “Paid leave significantly decreases infant mortality, while other leave has no significant effect. This suggests that if leave is provided without adequate payment and job protection, parental leave-taking behavior may not be very responsive. . . . As a result, other leave does not have a significant effect on improving infant health,” notes an Economic Journal report.²² In other words, it’s paid family leave that makes the big difference.