Washington Work and Family Coalition

King County vs. Seattle paid family leave: both a step forward, both need improvement

Seattle’s own Erica C. Barnett takes a closer look at recent paid family leave plans passed by Seattle and King County, and finds the city provides as little as four weeks guaranteed time off, while the county guarantees 12 weeks but requires long-term employees to exhaust as much as 10 weeks of their sick leave, reducing the actual parental leave time to two weeks:

Under the county system, new employees would benefit substantially more than workers with more tenure, because they would get 12 weeks paid leave no matter what. For example, a worker who had accrued two weeks’ vacation and sick leave would get to keep that leave and take 12 weeks off to care for a new child, no questions asked. However, given the long tenure of most county employees, and the speed with which county workers rack up leave (the average accrued leave, according to the county executive’s report on the proposal, is 460 hours, or just shy of 12 weeks), the parental leave policy would function largely as a way to spend down accrued employee hours, at minimal ($2.9 million) annual cost to the county. The caveat to that, of course, is that newer workers are more likely to be younger, and new parents (at least new mothers ) are usually under 40.

The city’s policy, by the way, has exactly the inverse impact. New workers, who haven’t accrued much leave yet, get to take the least time off (potentially only four weeks total, as guaranteed by the new policy), and more-tenured workers can take as much time as they have accrued. A city employee who has accrued, say, 16 weeks of leave could take up to 20 weeks off—four plus his vacation and sick time.

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Each is better than the previous policy of no parental leave at all. But neither meets the international standard of 12 weeks of paid parental leave, period, on top of sick and vacation time. (As the county executive’s report on the program notes, “The United States stands virtually alone in not mandating paid leave of any type for its workers.”) The city’s provides as little as four weeks guaranteed time off; the county guarantees 12 weeks but requires long-term employees to exhaust as much as 10 weeks of their sick leave, reducing the actual parental leave time to two weeks.

Differences like this are exactly why we need a statewide family and medical leave insurance plan that guarantees similar benefits to all workers. The Washington Work and Family Coalition is working with champions in the legislature to assure all workers have access to paid family and disability leave through the FaMLI Act. Key elements of the FaMLI Act are:

Provide up to 12 weeks to care for a new child or seriously ill family member, and 12 weeks for the worker’s own serious health condition;
Provide benefits of 2/3 weekly pay;
Pay for benefits through payroll premiums of 0.2% paid by workers and matched by employers (less than $2.00 per week for the typical worker).

Read more about our proposal here – and be sure to sign up for email updates to keep up with the latest developments on this legislation during the 2016 state legislative session!

Netflix Just Made Another Huge Stride On Parental Leave

caption here — Photo: Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar/Flickr Creative Commons

Netflix is taking a huge step forward for the working parents it employs. Hourly workers were previously excluded from the company’s generous parental leave policy – but no longer.

The California-based tech company announced in August that it would give its salaried employees up to 12 months of paid parental leave to take at their own discretion. The Huffington Post reported at the time that the announcement left out the employees who work on the DVD side of the business, most of whom are hourly employees. Now the company is reversing its decision.

Beginning in 2016, hourly workers will get paid parental leave at 100 percent pay, with various lengths depending on which part of the company they work for.

Full story: Huffington Post »

For Women, Income Inequality Continues Into Retirement

11122015_clow-lsmith — Lydia Smith stands in the kitchen of her home in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. She has lived in this apartment for 46 years, and now that she is on a fixed income, she pays rent with the aid of Section 8 tenant-based assistance. Photo: Megan Miller for NPR

[Via: NPR.org] Poverty does not treat men and women equally, especially in old age. Women 65 years old and older who are living in poverty outnumber men in those circumstances by more than 2 to 1. And these women are likely to face the greatest deprivation as they become older and more frail.

This pretty much describes the situation of 87-year-old Lydia Smith.

In her small, tidy apartment near downtown Los Angeles, she’s surrounded by dozens of family photographs. She picks out one and points to her twin sister, her mother and her brother. “Unfortunately, he’s gone,” she says. “She’s gone,” she says, pointing to her sister. And “Mama’s gone,” she says.

Smith, a war bride, came to the United States from Rome with her family after World War II. But she got divorced in the 1950s and never remarried. Once her son and daughter were grown, she moved to this second-story walk-up.

“I’ve been here 46 years in this apartment,” she says. “I have no intention of moving, either.”

How could she disrupt all of her neatly arranged collections? There’s a basket of baby dolls, a Barbie-filled breakfront and a bunch of Hello Kitty knickknacks. All are the result of a discerning eye and the local Goodwill store, pretty much the only place she’s bought anything in years.

She gets just over $900 a month from Social Security, and that’s it. Her apartment is subsidized through a program called Section 8. She pays about a third of her income in rent; the government picks up the rest. Smith doesn’t get food stamps, but she does qualify for Medicaid. That’s a good thing, since she’s being treated for a heart condition and severe arthritis.

“When you’re in constant pain, you have no desire to be active,” Smith says. “So this is why I stay home a lot. I don’t go places.”

Smith never saved for retirement. It didn’t occur to her. And with the kind of money she made working as a clerk in a department store and a cashier at a restaurant, there wasn’t much left over anyway.

This is the story of most of the 2.6 million women ages 65 and over who are living at or below the poverty line, says Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women’s Law Center.