This Holiday Season, Let’s Pass Paid Leave.
By Dawn Huckelbridge, Director, Paid Leave for All
This Thanksgiving, many families will be celebrating together for the first time in years. I remember not long ago when my son could only see his grandparents through glass, his hands pressed against it. It’s been years since many of us have had the joy of a holiday meal or even an embrace with the people we love. Some of us will have empty chairs at the table. And as we reflect on all that we’ve lost, what matters most, perhaps what we’ve learned — being there for the people we love when they need care should be at the top of the lessons we take away.
Paid family and medical leave, which allows us to do that, is a common-sense policy and protection we should have had long before the pandemic hit. This spring and summer, it looked certain that the United States would finally join its peers in guaranteeing paid leave to all working people, as the President and members of Congress promised. But instead, paid leave has since been slashed, cut once entirely from the White House’s framework to “Build Back Better,” and now is at threat again in the Senate.
Uniquely in America is it a question of whether a parent must die alone, whether a postpartum woman can safely heal, whether a worker must still clock in when they’re ill. We are one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t offer any form of paid leave to its people, and as a result the vast majority of Americans have none. And we have lived through an experience that should have taught us the value of presence, of being there for our families, of health and human touch and care. We’ve watched people die alone, say their final goodbyes over iPads. We’ve seen images of patients holding empty hospital gloves filled with water for comfort. We’ve seen parents and caregivers reach breaking points. We’ve forced essential workers to make unimaginable choices between risking their lives or their livelihoods; going into work and possibly bringing home a deadly virus, or staying home and losing their pay or their jobs.
We’ve witnessed the literal connections of community — that even if we take it for granted that we have paid leave, but our delivery driver does not, it can impact us; that even if we have paid leave, but our grocery store clerk or our child’s teacher or the waiter in the restaurant does not, it can impact us. We should have learned that a single worker’s access to protections like paid leave keep whole families, communities, and countries safer. And now without even the guarantee of limited emergency paid leave this year, more have died of COVID this year than last.
Paid leave should not ever have been the first thing lawmakers cut or compromised. It should have been a cornerstone of Build Back Better and a protected pillar of the care agenda from the beginning, a policy that could ameliorate all of the greatest challenges we’ve faced: an ongoing pandemic, a women’s recession, a caregiving crisis, deepening racial and gender inequity.
When Congress passed emergency paid leave at the start of COVID, even in its limited form, it prevented more than 15,000 cases per day nationwide in states without existing paid leave protections. It allowed workers to stay home when they were sick and not spread the virus, to quarantine safely and care for ill family members. Since 2020, we have lost more than 5 million women’s jobs, largely due to caregiving demands. Recent Census data show that as many as 15 million workers are still not working because of COVID and caregiving — paid leave would allow them to hold onto their jobs and their benefits. And this is true in crises and in everyday life: paid leave keeps caregivers in the workforce.
And paid leave is a policy with broad ripple effects. Low-wage workers and workers of color are less likely to have access to paid leave, which in turn lowers their chances of staying in jobs and accelerating in their careers. By providing families security and treating workers like whole people, it encourages ingenuity, creativity. It increases worker performance, productivity, and profitability. It helps small businesses weather transitions and families stay afloat. It makes our economy more competitive, increases pay parity between women and men, opens career possibilities and pathways to power, makes for a healthier, happier, and more prosperous society.
Paid leave is both a social equalizer and something that would unite us. It has the support of majorities in every party. In recent polling, 80 percent of voters in 2022 senate battleground states support paid medical leave and 76 percent support paid family leave. More than two-thirds of voters overall — including 89 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Independent women — agree Congress must pass it urgently.
But this isn’t new; polling has consistently placed paid leave as one of the most popular and widely supported policies in Democrats’ economic package, and in this country. Paid leave would support everyone from essential workers to veterans, rural families to low-wage workers; it would touch every working family in this country. It speaks deeply to both justice and freedom — to family values. It would give us the sense of security so many of us have lost. Paid leave is the profound legacy we can leave this country after what we’ve lived through, and what we continue to grapple with.
Paid leave is a policy that more than meets this moment. And it’s what the voters demand and working families deserve. It’s almost as if we were tested, a solution was presented, and now it’s still a question of whether we seize it, or whether we squander it. Congress did the right thing by restoring four weeks of comprehensive paid leave in the Build Back Better Act and passing it in a historic vote last week. This holiday season, the Administration and the Senate should follow suit.
This Thanksgiving, let’s give thanks for health, for family, and for the enormous opportunities and possibilities ahead of us. Let’s pass paid leave.
