Four in five Americans thinks companies should be required to “offer paid leave to parents of new children and employees caring for sick family members.” So trust a Republican to come up with a paid family leave policy that doesn’t require anything and benefits business, not workers. Marco Rubio is the one Republican presidential candidate with any plan on this issue, and experts say it wouldn’t expand paid leave to many workers who don’t already have it.
Rubio would give tax credits to companies that offer paid leave. The problem is, such tax credits already exist for other things the government wants to encourage companies to do—and we know that it doesn’t work very well.
The government offers tax credits to encourage companies to do other things, like hiring veterans or people with disabilities and offering on-site child care. But there is little evidence that these credits significantly change employers’ behavior. Employer-sponsored child care is still extremely rare, for instance, and a subsidy for firms that hire various disadvantaged workers has been found to have little effect on their employment.
Rubio’s plan would be a nice reward for companies that are already doing the right thing by offering paid leave, but it’s unlikely to mean paid leave for workers who don’t already have it, and that means once again leaving low-income women in the dust. Hillary Clinton policy adviser Ann O’Leary writes that:
The companies that don’t offer [paid leave] tend to have large and mainly lower-skilled workforces. But that’s the rub?—?the people who need paid leave the most are the very people that Rubio’s plan ignores. While everyone should have access to paid family leave, it’s particularly vital for, say, a mother working at a low wage, because she’ll likely have less in savings. […]Consider this fact: In the early 1960s, just over 16 percent of women with less than a high school education had access to paid maternity leave after the birth of their first child. Today that number has not moved at all?—?still only 16 percent of our least educated workers have paid family leave.
But for women with a college degree or more, in the early 1960s, 14 percent had access to paid leave and today that number is over 64 percent. We have literally not moved the needle at all to help our least empowered workers have access to paid maternal leave.
We need policies that actually change this, expanding paid family leave to people who cannot afford to miss a week of pay, not policies that exist to get attention for Marco Rubio as the lone Republican talking about paid leave.
This blog was originally posted on Daily Kos on September 28, 2015. Reprinted with permission.
