This article was originally posted on Times Union.
By Ed Ott and Nancy Rankin
As we head back to work after the Labor Day weekend, it’s a good time to reflect on how things are going for New York’s 9 million working people.
We’ve made some progress this year: the lowest-paid workers got the first installment of their raise, as the state minimum wage went to $8 an hour. Not nearly enough, and tipped workers are still owed their promised increase, but a start. The labor movement succeeded in achieving greater child care funding in the state budget. And over 1.2 million workers in New York City who did not have a single paid sick day before this year are now able to take sick leave without losing their wages or their jobs.
All of these will be good for New Yorkers and good for New York. When workers earn a decent living with sensible policies — like child care and sick days — they can take care of their families, pay their taxes and help grow our businesses.
But lawmakers left Albany before completing one important initiative: paid family leave.
A few times in almost all our work lives, we need a period of weeks to care for a newborn or be at the bedside of a seriously ill family member. Every expert agrees on the importance of breast-feeding and early childhood development. Yet too many parents are unable to take off even the first precious weeks of their children’s lives to bond with and nurture them, because we are one of only two nations without government-guaranteed paid family leave. Of 185 countries tracked by the International Labour Organization, Papua New Guinea and the United States alone fail to provide paid maternity leave.
Too many elderly parents are ending up in costly facilities, often at the taxpayer expense, because a grown child cannot take time away from work to help them recuperate from a broken hip, chemotherapy or heart surgery. Too many hard-working employees cannot care for a spouse with HIV in weeks of crisis.
Some will argue workers could use saved-up vacation and sick days. But that ignores the reality that a large fraction of employees do not get any paid vacation and many workers outside New York City are still without paid sick leave. These tend to be low-paid workers, exactly those unable to save anything from inadequate wages to sustain themselves and their families for days, much less weeks, without a paycheck. Two-thirds of low-income workers in New York City have no paid vacation, according to a 2013 Community Service Society survey. Close to half said they had less than $500 to fall back on. Eight days’ lost pay for people making minimum wage would entirely wipe out their life savings.
Even those who have paid leave may not be able to use it for family members, or may quickly exhaust their time when faced with a difficult pregnancy, premature birth or traumatic family illness, like a childhood cancer.
When temporary family crises trigger job loss, a low-income family’s hardships skyrocket. The CSS survey found that when a household member lost a job in the past year, those who reported falling behind on the rent or mortgage doubled and the number who were unable to fill a needed prescription shot up to 47 percent from 19 percent.
The simple solution is to provide paid family leave for all workers. New York already has a Temporary Disability Insurance system that can easily be modernized to provide up to 12 weeks of insurance benefits to help replace earnings during time needed to care for a new child or seriously ill family member. This proposal costs only pennies per paycheck, paid for entirely by employees. Along with this change, disability benefits need to be brought to an adequate level for today’s cost of living, not left at the meager $170 a week where they have been frozen for the past 25 years. The state Assembly has already passed a bill to make these improvements. But Senate went home this summer without bringing the measure to a vote.
Momentum is building around the country: California, New Jersey and Rhode Island have already modernized their state disability insurance programs to provide paid family leave, and studies show that any concerns that businesses would be negatively impacted have not been borne out. Moreover, policies that enable women to remain in the labor force boost the economy overall. Polls of both voters and small business owners show New Yorkers overwhelmingly favor paid family leave.
As our our attention turns from the Labor Day holiday behind us to the elections ahead, we should think of those torn between demands of earning the money to support their families and taking temporary time off to care for an infant in the first weeks of life or an ailing mother in her last weeks. We should ask those seeking our votes this fall whether they will pass paid family leave so that New York’s working families do not have to choose between their livelihoods and their loved ones.
Edward Ott is the Distinguished Lecturer in Labor Studies at the Murphy Institute, CUNY, and former executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. Nancy Rankin is vice president for Policy Research and Advocacy at the Community Service Society in New York City.
Photo via Flickr
