Paid Parental Leave for Federal Workers
The House is scheduled to vote today on H.R. 626, the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2009. The bill would provide four weeks of paid parental leave to federal employees. A similar bill passed the House last year, so passage is all-but-guaranteed. Jim Webb, who’s sponsoring the Senate version of the bill, has a fact sheet out that’s useful. When the bill moved through committee, The Washington Post covered conservatives objections, whereby basically the right doesn’t think it’s worth devoting any resources whatsoever into improving working conditions for federal employees. That makes sense if you put zero value on the ability of federal agencies to do perform their functions effectively, but not so much for the rest of us.
A larger issue, of course, is the general lack of paid parental leave in the United States. In most developed countries some form of paid leave is mandatory:
This is basically a recognition on the part of everyone from Japan to Norway to Canada that having a child isn’t just a random consumption choice that we should leave entirely up to the free market. Parents have a special social role to play, and it’s important to all of us to put them in a position to play it well. You might think that family values loving conservatives would see this as perhaps a bigger problem than whether or not gay couples in New Hampshire can get married.
Here’s some earlier CAP work on paid leave in California and family policy (including paid leave) in the UK.
25 Responses to “Paid Parental Leave for Federal Workers”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
June 4th, 2009 at 10:53 am
This policy is fine and all, but what about private workers?
The benefits gap between public employees and the average worker is starting to get pretty darn big.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:04 am
This was a truly ridiculous aspect of federal employment, so it is nice to see it being addressed.
This policy is fine and all, but what about private workers? The benefits gap between public employees and the average worker is starting to get pretty darn big.
Well, of course some private firms already offer paid parental leave. And generally, private employees doing similar jobs with similar qualifications tend to make higher salaries than their public peers.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:09 am
2: I am willing to bet that the compensation curve is flatter for government employees. For someone with a law degree, your statement may be true. But for the person working at the desk at the DMV, I am not so sure. That is where those benefits can be very valuable.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:24 am
mpowell gets it. 2009 schedule here. Some benefits here. Does Walmart offer Sunday premium pay?
June 4th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I am willing to bet that the compensation curve is flatter for government employees.
There is some truth to this: entry-level and low-skill positions tend to have compensation closer to market rates. If nothing else, in addition to the benefits, they often come with an unusual amount of job security for such positions.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:30 am
As somebody who used to work in the federal government, I can report that the Rethuglicans ever since Reagan have taken the position that people who work for the government are scum and drones who should be eliminated by privatization (known as an A76) whenever possible. That has led to the employment of the Blackwater thugs in Iraq, among other atrocities.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Does Walmart offer Sunday premium pay?
It is a bit misleading to use a comparison to a retailer for this issue, since Sundays are part of their regular hours of business. Indeed, lots of non-retail private employers offer premium pay for Sundays and holidays.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:38 am
I don’t understand the graphic.
Compare http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file40677.pdf from which can be quoted:
Maybe someone has mixed up weeks and months?
June 4th, 2009 at 11:48 am
It looks like the graphic is only maternity leave, i.e. not including parental and childcare leave. So, not a terribly useful comparsion.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:51 am
You might think that family values loving conservatives would see this as perhaps a bigger problem than whether or not gay couples in New Hampshire can get married.
You might, but you would be wrong. But then again, you have to realize that “family values loving conservatives” don’t actually love families — rather, they love using the phrase “family values” as a cloak to cover their true agenda of sanctimonious hypocritical moralizing.
For example, given the choice between (a) paying taxes to fund child health care and day care programs that help an unwed teenage mother raise her baby, and (b) wagging a finger at the filthy slut and her bastard brat, don’t we know which one they choose every time?
June 4th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
PeakTV, government pay is flatter than the chart indicates. GS-1s and 2s are almost non-existent. College freshmen working internships before their sophemore year are generally GS-3s.
so govt pay ranges, in reality, from about 21500 to 177000, about a factor of 8. Walmat goes from significantly below this to significantly above it.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
The bit about “entry level positions” is incorrect. An engineer just finishing his undergrad work hired by the government makes about 60% of what he’d make in his first year in private industry. Within 3 years, the pay is very close for the two. Ten years later, with a PhD and a team of subordinates, the private industry guy is again making much more, though there won’t be as big a differential as there was in the first year.
It is in positions that don’t pay well even for long-time workers that government pay is better. An experienced stock-clerk for the government makes much more than one working for walmart.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I agree with 9. It looks like Canada is being credited with 17 weeks of maternal leave (to be used by the mother before birth), but they’re ignoring the 37 weeks of parental leave (to be used by either parent after birth)*.
Also, it looks like the UK is including the post-birth parental leave in their 52 weeks of “maternity” leave.
* http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/lp/lo/opd-ipg/ipg/014.shtml
June 4th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
“whereby basically the right doesn’t think it’s worth devoting any resources whatsoever into improving working conditions for federal employees.”
Their work conditions are hardly bad. You start with 2 weeks vacation, and you get a bunch of sick leave. After 3 years in you are up to 20 days vacation per year, and your sick leave allowance goes up. I think it’s either 7 or 10 years in where you get to 30 days leave per year, and sick leave goes up again.
Finally, there’s a leave sharing bank (I know because my wife used it at one point) whereby you can borrow hours from people who don’t need them now, and then pay them back as you earn them.
This may be a fine law, but it doesn’t need to be justified on some mythical grounds of poor work conditions. Federal employees have it a whole lot easier than the rest of us, and it takes an act of god for them to lose their jobs (if they are union members, even god can’t touch them).
June 4th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Federal sick leave is used in the same way that other private companies use short-term disability. All those years you spend in the federal government saving up sick days are for the time when you get cancer or some other condition that requires frequent treatment and extended hospitalization and recovery periods. That and it gives your supervisor the authority to tell you to stop showing up to work sick all the time.
But the thing is that paid maternity leave is pretty much a standard perk of many white collar jobs. It’s almost embarrassing that the federal government doesn’t have that by now.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
You might think that family values loving conservatives would see this as perhaps a bigger problem than whether or not gay couples in New Hampshire can get married.
Don’t be ridiculous, Matt. Everybody knows the quicker you introduce little babies to the harshness and realities of the cruel world — via an insistence on un-buffered free market conditions — the better for them, and for society as a whole.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
“You might think that family values loving conservatives would see this as perhaps a bigger problem than whether or not gay couples in New Hampshire can get married.”
Them wimmins ain’t sposed to be wurkin anywho. God says so.
Or so says the conservative family values crowd.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
#15
I have what could be considered a very attractive white collar job. Engineer for a huge, successful, diversified, and well known corporation. Prior to that I worked for a small engineering R&D company. My wife is a mental health professional who has worked for two different firms. In that time, we have had three children. Paid maternity leave was never an option.*
The state that we live in does require full time employees the right to substitute other paid leave for the unpaid federal FMLA leave. So, technically we could get some paid leave but only by using our vacation time. And, none of the companies went out of their way to let employees know that this was an option.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Jacob’s right. I’ve never worked in a company or firm (professional in downtown Chicago for twenty years) that offers any kind of paid maternity leave.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Hm. A job I had many years ago offerred paid maternity leave. My current job (with a larger, wealthier organization), now that I look, does not offer paid maternity leave. So I guess I was wrong about how common I perceived that to be.
June 4th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
“This is basically a recognition on the part of everyone from Japan to Norway to Canada that having a child isn’t just a random consumption choice that we should leave entirely up to the free market.”
Damn right. Having a child imposes MASSIVE negative externalities on the rest of humanity. Pretty much every serious problem we face boils down to a consequence of over-population. Given this, what the federal government should be doing is making it ever harder to have children, not subsidizing them.
Morons, morons, the entire human race. Enjoy the coming apocalypse, you twits.
June 4th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
The problem with the government is that they will not calculate how many FTE’s they will lose with this program and will not add additional people. That means that VA claims will be processed slower, EPA reviews will be done slower.
If the government wants to give everyone some perk then they would have to give up something else such as the high level of training classes or the diverity days.
June 5th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Re: Having a child imposes MASSIVE negative externalities on the rest of humanity.
Having “a” child does not. Having many (= more than two) does.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
The numbers in the graph seems quite off for the two data points I know about. In Norway the parents get 44 weeks fully paid leave (3-12 weeks before birth and the rest after birth). In Sweden the parents get 390 days (55 weeks) after birth at about 80% pay (and 90 days unpaid). Granted in both countries pay-out is limited to something a bit above average pay, and at least in Sweden leave can be saved until the child is seven, but the numbers shown above still seems very low.
June 8th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
[...] T.H. said this chart of paid parental leave in different countries is inaccurate, and sends this more up-to-date chart, [...]