Washington - During the 2016 presidential campaign, both
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton pledged their support for more paid family
leave. Now big business is countering the calls with a proposal of its own. Congress
should establish a certain optional amount of paid leave and, if companies meet
that threshold, they should be protected from state or local laws that might
require more.
The proposal is part of a report being
released Tuesday by the HR Policy Association, a coalition of more than 380
major US
companies. Together, the group’s members employ 9 percent of America’s
private sector workers.
Executives on the committee behind the
report represent companies including Marriott International, Procter &
Gamble, IBM, Cigna, General Electric, Wendy’s, Oracle and General Mills. The
pre-emptive strike from the business community is also a response to the
increasing number of states and municipalities that have taken matters into
their own hands, passing local laws that require employers to offer paid time
“should be encouraged to continue to do so,” said Cigna Executive Vice
President John Murabito, who serves on the board of the HR Policy Association
and on the committee that put together the report. “One clear way of doing that
would be to provide relief from widely varying state and local mandates.”
Top
companies
As of now, federal law offers many
employees the opportunity to take unpaid family leave, but doesn’t require
employers to give workers paid time off for sickness or childcare, including
maternity leave. Since 2011, seven states and dozens of cities have passed laws
requiring companies to provide paid sick days. Another two states and the District of Columbia
passed laws creating family leave funds and requiring companies to let their
employees use them.
In places like California,
Arizona, New York City
and Minneapolis,
new laws let employees accrue at least one hour of sick time for every 30 hours
of work, or roughly one sick day for every six weeks of full-time work.
Nationally about 61 percent of private-sector workers have access to some form
of paid sick days, according to 2015 data from the Bureau of Labour
Statistics. Twelve percent have some form of paid family leave.
In response to the spread of local
regulations, conservatives and business groups have pushed state lawmakers to
strip cities and towns of the authority to pass such measures. With the GOP now
in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, said University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos,
they have the chance to pre-empt states and cities nationwide a strategy that
could establish precedent for other issues.
It would be unusual for Congress to
override state or local mandates on pay or benefits, Bagenstos said. Federal
employment law has generally acted as a floor establishing national minimum
standards like a $7 25 hourly wage rather than as a ceiling.
During the campaign, Trump had proposed
establishing a federal policy that would provide for six weeks of paid maternity
leave for new mothers. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment
about the Administration’s paid leave plans, which have not been a central
issue in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.
Sympathetic
Congress
Congressman Bradley Byrne, an Alabama
Republican who chairs the Workforce Protections subcommittee, said he’s
interested in the idea of a safe harbour. “People move across state lines,
companies operate across state lines. We’ve got to bring some uniformity to
this both for the companies’ sake, but more importantly for the employees’ sake
as they move around,” he said.
The HR Policy Association says companies
don’t need government regulation to be generous with their workers. “While
many existing government policies assume employers will only treat their
employees fairly if they are required by law to do so, the war for talent
negates that assumption,” Merck & Co. executive vice president
Mirian Graddick-Weir, who chairs the
association, said in an email. Current laws on the books still assume “that
employers were likely to take advantage of employees, so we just need to put
lots of protections in place,” said CIT Group chief human resources officer Jim
Duffy. “Now really the shoe is clearly on the other foot the workers really
have the leverage.”
Democratic
Alternatives
Coming from companies that operate in
multiple countries, complaints about the administrative headaches of
complying with varying laws are a pretext for firms angling to stanch progress
on paid leave, labour advocates say.
“This is creating a ‘safe harbour’ for the
largest corporations at the expense of financial security for families,” said
Ellen Bravo, founder of the coalition Family
Values
at work
For their part, congressional Democrats
have in recent years repeatedly introduced proposals to establish federal
minimums for paid leave, while still allowing states and cities to set their
own higher standards. “Because there has been a lack of federal action, you’ve
seen communities taking this issue into their own hands,” said Heather Boushey,
executive director of the Washington Centre for Equitable Growth. “If the
employers are frustrated that they have different systems, then we should be
thinking about what is that basic benefit that we should be providing at the
federal level.”
‘Too
Intrusive’
That’s not an idea the HR Policy
Association has embraced. “I think that probably feels a little too intrusive
for our membership,” said Johnna Torsone, executive vice president
of Pitney Bowes, who worked on the report and chairs the association’s
Employment Rights Committee. Offering a safe harbour, she said, “feels more
amenable” to industry leaders.
Pitney Bowes says it provides its staff
with up to six paid sick days a year and eight weeks of fully-paid family
leave, along with vacation.
“The question is,” said Torsone, “if you’ve
provided a certain level of paid leave within your structure, should you be
subjected to 30 different approaches to this and have to monitor it?”
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