If you’re anything like me, you might not exactly know what career path you will be taking after you graduate, let alone how you might handle needing paid time off if you were employed by a company or person who does not provide it.
It is also fair to assume that you might not even be aware that paid leave is not a guaranteed commodity provided by federal or Colorado legislation, or that it affects a lot more of the population than just new parents.
I actually did not learn about this issue myself until I had to do research for another topic in my public speaking class last spring: the gender pay gap. Until then, I did not know anything about the current legislation in place on the federal or local level, and I had no idea that there were so many people with a stake in the issue aside from parents.
As it turns out, paid leave can actually have a really positive impact on economic issues such as unemployment rates and the wage gap, the overall prosperity of small and private businesses, and the overall health and wellness of mothers and newborns.
It is also important to note the distinction between maternity leave, which covers only mothers, and family leave, which covers a wide range of potential caretakers. This makes paid family leave a potential solution to caretaking inequalities between mothers and fathers, and between parents and less traditional caretakers as well.
Keeping that in mind, I decided that focusing on paid family leave in Colorado for my final community argument for my Writing Arguments class was the best option. I also decided that Her Campus was the most effective way to get this argument out to the audience who most needs to hear it (which is where you all come in).
In all of my research over the course of the semester, along with conversations I have had with several peers about this issue, what I have found is that younger demographics are not being considered in the process of passing legislation in Colorado. Further, younger demographics are largely unaware of the very real stakes they have in the issue themselves.
I know, right?
As young women at CSU, the work being done to increase gender and class equality in Colorado is something that will determine what we deal with and accomplish as women in the future. As you will see throughout this article, the lack of paid leave has the biggest impact on women and low-income workers. Because women and low-income employees make up such a large portion of our population, improvements in their lives stand to improve the overall quality of life in Colorado as a whole.
With that being said, I know that reading a lengthy, information-packed article is probably the last thing you need as you prepare for finals week, but I still want to make sure you can get the most comprehensive understanding of this issue and its importance to the Colorado community. Luckily, I have an amazing team of classmates by my side, including Addison Lyons, Jessika Hoyberg-Nielsen, and Erin Peterson, who have helped me to condense our findings and argument as much as possible while still keeping it entertaining.
What are the current policies in place for paid family leave?
The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is a federal law that was made in 1993, which currently guarantees up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave per year for the care of a newborn, adopted or foster child, or care for a sick or elderly family member. As it stands now, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New York are the only four states with expansive legislation in place that guarantees paid family leave (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2016).
This law only applies to workers employed by private employers with more than 50 employees on their payroll, which has a significant impact on Colorado’s workforce. According to Colorado.gov, there are about 815,000 people working for private businesses who have children at home, which only makes up about 43% of our total work force. To put that into perspective, that leaves up to 57 percent of the Colorado workforce without adequate paid leave options. Many of those are low-income workers living paycheck to paycheck, who are unable to support themselves financially through other means during periods of extended leave.
Passing a paid family leave program that expands on the federal policy in Colorado would extend to that 57 percent of the workforce, which would benefit both families and businesses. So far, Colorado has made four separate attempts at legislation expanding on FMLA, and only two of those focused on paid support for new parents and caretakers. Both attempts to expand the federal policy for parental and family leave in the last three years “died on the calendar,” which means that Colorado legislators do not consider those issues to be a priority for the Colorado community (Colorado.gov, 2017).
So, why is it so important to pass an expansive policy in Colorado?
The most obvious factor that makes paid leave so important is its effect on women and children, because the first thing to pop into most people’s heads when it comes to paid leave is maternity leave. And it’s true, mothers and women in general do have a big stake in this issue.
Maternity leave is associated with a variety of public health benefits: longer pregnancies; decreased C-section risk; more well-baby visits; decrease of infant mortality rates by about 4.5% according to the Century Foundation; longer periods of breastfeeding; and improved mental health of new mothers (American Public Health Association, 2013). Studies have also shown that these effects only come as a result of paid leave, likely because of the stress that comes with decreased income and employment security in unpaid leave (National Partnership for Women and Families, 2018).
Economically, paid leave is shown to improve pay inequality between men and women, and to improve the quality and status of women’s presence in the workforce. This is a precedent that has been set in states like California, which suggests that the adoption of a similar program in Colorado would have the same effect (Urban Institute, 2017).
On top of that, two studies provided by the National Partnership for Women and Families show that “if women participated in the U.S. labor force at the same rates as women in countries with paid leave, our economy would benefit from more than $500 billion in additional activity each year.” In addition, they found that “women who take paid leave are 93 percent more likely to be in the workforce nine to twelve months after a child’s birth than women who take no leave.” That means that improvements for working women will result in overall improvements for the economy.
Still, there are a whole host of other moving pieces that stand to be positively impacted by paid leave.
Because paid family leave applies to fathers as well as mothers, creating a Colorado policy would provide paid support both to single fathers and to same-sex male parents. In low-income families, it would eliminate the need for fathers to work overtime or work multiple jobs so that the mothers of their children can take unpaid leave or even quit their jobs to take care of their newborn.
When it comes to adopting or fostering children, the legal process can be a lengthy and expensive one. The process of bonding with new children from different backgrounds in a household does not happen with the snap of a finger either.
Ensuring that all types of parents can get the job security and financial support they need when welcoming new lives into their families should be a universal entitlement, and providing that in Colorado would bring us one step closer to reaching that reality.
Parenting responsibilities aside, the current laws also apply to ‘caregivers,’ or members of the workforce providing unpaid care to special needs children, sick family members, or elderly family members. According to a study conducted by the National Alliance for Caregiving and the American Association of Retired Persons, around 65 million Americans currently serve as unpaid caregivers to the elderly or special needs children. About two-thirds of those 65 million reported needing time off from work for their caregiving responsibilities (Center for American Progress, 2012).
Those results make caregiving outside of traditional parenthood a major factor in the paid leave debate, especially when considering the low income population. Low-income workers are unable to take unpaid time from work or risk losing employment for caretaking responsibilities, but they also cannot afford to hire a nurse or care facility. The people who need paid leave the most are the ones who have the least access to it, which can make living comfortably nearly unattainable for many of those families.
So, if paid leave affects that many people, why hasn’t any progress been made? What holds Colorado back from making new policies?
Those are two of the most confounding questions when discussing this issue, because studies show that the majority of both Republicans and Democrats agree that paid family leave is important (Urban Institute, 2017). Based on our findings, the main source of hesitation for legislators comes from two oppositional arguments against the benefits of paid leave.
The first argument claims that, although employers are not responsible for covering the cost of paid leave itself, they are responsible for providing continuous health insurance to those employees that take leave. The idea is that those costs to the employer plus the costs of hiring replacement workers for the leave period comes out to be a significant strain on the company. According to the Heritage Foundation, the health care costs alone come out to be between $1,500 and $3,000 per employee over a six- to twelve-week period of leave.
It is absolutely right that employers do not cover the wages provided under a paid leave plan themselves, because the most recent paid family leave plan proposed in Colorado was designed to be funded by a proportional income tax, not by businesses themselves (The Denver Post, 2018).
Although the argument is credible in that respect, businesses in paid leave mandated states report either neutral or positive effects on profit: “After California instituted paid leave, a survey showed that 91 percent of all employers said the policy either boosted profits or had no effect” (The Century Foundation, 2017). Based on those results, the long-term success of businesses outweighs the short-term costs that come with job-protected paid leave.
The second argument claims that forcing businesses to offer paid leave will result in higher rates of gender discrimination (Foundation for Economic Education, 2015). It is true that the potential for women of a certain age to start a family would be a cause for discrimination by employers, but the idea that the discrimination would come as a direct result of mandating leave policies is misguided.
The truth is, women are already facing high levels of discrimination in the workforce for their want and potential to have kids. The only difference right now is that many face that discrimination AND have to quit their jobs or scramble to afford leave through other means, because there is no policy in place to protect them.
According to the Urban Institute, “Five percent of first-time mothers who worked during their pregnancy in 2006–08 were let go from their job during pregnancy or within six months of childbirth, 22 percent quit their job, 42 percent took unpaid leave, 10 percent took disability leave, and 51 percent used paid maternity, sick, vacation, or other paid leave. These percentages add to more than 100 percent because many mothers use a combination of arrangements.”
The data above shows that women’s workforce participation is severely affected by the lack of paid leave policies to support them, so it is hard to imagine that putting a supportive policy in place would hurt their participation any further. According to the Century Foundation, “the American women’s labor force participation rate would have been seven points higher than it was in 2010” if a paid leave policy were in place. The potential equalizing effect of a Colorado policy would far outweigh a slight increase in the discrimination that women already face in the workforce on a daily basis.
Even considering all of the evidence to the contrary of these counterclaims, lawmakers still refuse to push an expansive and inclusive policy through to law.
This is an extremely complex issue with a lot of moving pieces, but what it all boils down to is this: The evidence shows that a paid family leave policy in Colorado would have a positive impact on the quality of life for our population, including improvements in gender equality; increases to accessibility of leave to low-wage workers; improvements in public health outcomes; and spikes in various areas of the economy.
Still, change will never happen if the Colorado lawmakers do not make it a priority, and they will never make it a priority if they do not know that their younger constituency demographics care. To reiterate a confounding piece of the issue: paid family leave already has bipartisan support among politicians (Urban Institute, 2017), but still the legislation dies on the calendar. Why? Because they agree on what makes it important but they do not realize how important it really is, which we think comes from young Coloradans not making their voices heard.
The likelihood that you or someone close to you will become a caregiver or need caregiving in some capacity in your life time is astronomical. At our age, it would be really easy not to think about big issues like these in our country that are having a noticeable impact on the generations that came before us and their children, because we think it does not apply to us, but the truth is that it does. We need to take action now, before we get out into the workforce and realize how little Colorado and federal legislation protect us and protect our peers.
So, here is what I am asking you to do: call, text, email, badger your congress people about this issue, start conversations with friends and family to get them informed and invested too, even post on your social media or any platform at your disposal about it. We are the generation that holds the power for making change, all we have to do is learn how to use it.
For more information on paid family leave policies, you can visit: http://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PSD_SDOH_Paid-Leave_long.pdf &http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-family-and-medical-leave-laws.aspx .
For more information on the effects of paid family leave, you can visit: https://tcf.org/content/facts/facts-behind-americans-need-nationwide-paid-family-leave/?agreed=1 .