It’s a new year and this month, if you’re like most employees in New York State, for the first time you don’t have to choose between care-taking for a new baby or a close family member who is sick. The state’s new paid family leave law provides eligible government and private sector workers eight weeks of partially paid leave during the time they take off for care-taking.
The amounts of pay that an employee receives will eventually be the most generous in the nation but this year, the wage displacement is meant to cover 50% of your salary, rising each year until 2022 to 67% in 2022. There is a cap on payments, however, of $652.96 per week. New parents of adoptive, newborn or foster children can take the leave as well as those who need to care for a seriously ill or injured family member, or one that is deploying for military service.
The benefits of paid leave are many. Policy makers and advocacy organizations cite health benefits such as reduced postpartum depression, better infant health outcomes and economic benefits such as greater attachment to the workforce.
Women in the Fairygodboss community, too, say they are more satisfied with their jobs when they take longer paid maternity leave. In other words, employers stand to gain in terms of increased loyalty and reduced employee turnover costs. Men, too, benefit from -- and take advantage of -- family leave. For example, Ellen Bravo, co-director of Family Values at Work has spoken about the fact that one third of those applying for paid family leave benefits in Rhode Island were men during the first year of the program.
Of course, having the legal right to paid leave is a step forward for families, in particular low-income ones who typically have no access to employer-sponsored leave benefits. Paid parental leave is available to between 12 to 15% of the workforce, depending on the source of those estimates.
In the absence of a nationwide standard on paid family leave, New York is following in the footsteps of other states that have taken up the mantle of providing it for employees within their borders. New York joins California, New Jersey and Rhode Island in enacting paid family leave as a state administered benefit. There is similar state and local legislation that will take effect next year and in 2020 in Washington state and Washington, D.C., respectively. While there is a bill in Congress which would provide American workers with up to twelve weeks of partial income replacement in addition to the job protection provided under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), state action like this may prove to be the model that the federal government looks to for best practices and lessons learned.
