Family leave for all, not just the stars?
The University of Houston’s Bauer School of Business hosted a panel of corporate leaders on Tuesday to talk about family-friendly policies in the workplace. Again and again, they emphasized the benefits of letting mothers and fathers take time off after the birth of a child — for the business, not just their employees.
“Practices that Pay,” the panel was called.
“If we didn’t think this was a really positive thing for the firm in term of recruiting and retention, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Linda Coberly, a partner at the law firm Winston and Strawn, which just upped its leave to 20 weeks for both parents. They’re not alone: Big corporations have been falling all over themselves to offer the benefit as a way to compete for talent.
What was the conversation missing? Any mention of making paid time off for family or health care reasons available to all workers, whether or not they make six-figure salaries or have highly sought-after skills. It’s something that’s popped up in the political sphere more frequently of late, from President Barack Obama calling for congressional action in last year’s State of the Union address to Ivanka Trump’s paean to working women in her Republican National Convention
speech last week.
“My father will change the labor laws that were put into place at a time when women were not a significant portion of the workforce,” Donald Trump’s daughter said. “Policies that allow women with children to thrive should not be novelties. They should be the norm.”
Many studies have shown that paid leave benefits children, families and the economy as a whole, since it helps women keep their jobs at a time when workforce participation is declining.
When asked whether companies should favor government action to force the kinds of policies they thought were so good for business, members of the Bauer School panel answered with caution.
“There’s always an impact to a regulation, so there’s a balance to be had there,” said Joanna Nolte, manager for equal opportunity and inclusion at Shell Oil Co. “There are a lot of countries that have much more generous leave policies for new mothers, and I have to admit I’m personally jealous of some of those. So I’m torn on that, but I think it’s something that we should explore further.”
In Texas, of course, such policies haven’t left the starting gate. Nearly every legislative session, advocates propose some form of family leave mandate, sometimes as modest as allowing paid time off for parent-teacher conferences. Every time, says Texas AFL-CIO SecretaryTreasurer Richard Levy, they get drowned out.
“The problem is that when you got to these hearings, you hear the representatives of businesses talk about how, ‘if the state feels it’s important for people to have the time off to do stuff, then the state should pay for it,’ ” Levy says. Even businesses that offer paid leave themselves might be hesitant to give up their competitive advantage by having the policy imposed statewide.
In recent years, more of the action has been on the local level, as cities such as San Francisco and Chicago pass paid sick and family leave ordinances on their own. Texas cities are free to do so as well — in a way that they’re not with the minimum wage, which is pre-empted by state law — but so far only Austin has managed to pass paid family leave for city employees.
Partly, University of Houston professor Elizabeth Gregory says, that’s because advocates are already focused on so many other urgent priorities for helping families in Texas cities. Day care and public education, for example.
“We’d be doing better to invest in our school system first, before expanding to the relative luxury of a mandated family leave, if the city was going to use funds to support it,” says Gregory, who directs the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program and strongly supports the policy.
“If the city wanted to mandate that employers pay full leaves, that would be an interesting argument to watch,” Gregory says.