Thomas Lai Yin Tang
Congress has stalled on passing paid leave, so major businesses are stepping up to say it's time for a national program.
In a new push organized by advocacy group Paid Leave for the United States (PL+US), firms like Reddit, Twitter, and DoorDash are throwing their support behind a national paid and family leave program.
"During the pandemic, we saw 2 million women leave the workplace," Orli Cotel, a senior advisor at PL+US, told Insider. "I think that's providing a labor shortage and also a talent shortage, especially among companies that are really trying hard to recruit and retain women in the workplace."
Businesses have struggled to staff up over the past year, with hundreds of thousands of workers still not returning to the workforce. Some of that may be due to lack of stable, affordable childcare and access to paid leave.
"Companies are seeing that without paid leave, parents — and especially women — are dropping out of the workforce," Cotel said.
Women are still down 1.1 million net jobs from February 2020, according to the National Women's Law Center. In March 2022, there 872,000 fewer women in the labor force than in February 2020, according to the NWLC.
Currently, across 41 countries, the US is the only one that does not mandate paid leave, according to Pew Research. As of March 2020, 94% of the highest-earning workers in America had access to paid sick leave — while just 31% of the lowest-earning workers had access to it, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A study from the Women Effect Action Fund and University of Massachusetts Amherst found that instituting paid leave would put $28.5 billion more in paychecks every year. In California, where paid leave has been law since 2002, employment for new mothers went up, while labor costs for small businesses went down, according to research from the Bay Area Council.
The fresh push for a national program comes even as talks remain stalled. Democrats included 12 weeks of paid leave in their initial $3.5 trillion social spending package. However, as negotiations continued and amid pushback from centrist Democratic holdouts like Sen. Joe Manchin, paid leave was dropped from President Joe Biden's Build Back Better framework.
Ultimately, four weeks of paid leave made it back in, following pressure from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democrats like Kirsten Gillibrand. However, Manchin later proclaimed the Build Back Better Act dead. He's pretty much shut the door on supporting a social spending package from Biden.
"Build Back better has collapsed at this point, so we need to be innovative and creative to find a way forward for paid leave," Cotel said. "These companies are taking a stand to say that we need our leaders in Washington to underscore their commitment to passing paid leave."
