Tag: maternity leave
Rhetoric Seldom Matches Reality Of Motherhood

Rhetoric Seldom Matches Reality Of Motherhood

The one good thing about Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s campaign for the presidency is that he provides many opportunities to point out to the rest of the country what we here in Ohio have known for too many years.

The man is no moderate. One of the ways he proves this, over and over again, is by how he talks about women. I may enjoy a little too much sharing the moment in 2012 when Kasich took the stage and offered this description of politicians’ wives:

“You know, Jane Portman, Karen Kasich and Janna Ryan, they operate an awful lot of the time in the shadows. It’s not easy to be a spouse of an elected official. You know, they’re at home, doing the laundry and doing so many things, while we’re up here on the stage getting a little bit of applause, right?”

As a full-time columnist married to a U.S. senator, I found this description of my life utterly fascinating. I do laundry, all right, but to tell the world I’m never applauded for the effort crosses a line, big-time.

If you’re one of those old-fashioned reasonable Republicans tempted to argue that Kasich is certainly more moderate than some of his fellow presidential candidates, please stop right there and think about what you’re about to say.

If it takes Donald — Round up the Muslims! — Trump and Ted — Science? We don’t need no stinkin’ science! — Cruz to make John Kasich look reasonable, we might as well move this shindig of a primary to a moisture farm on the three-moon planet of Tatooine.

Last week, Kasich was speaking at a campaign event in New Hampshire, when a man in the crowd asked where the candidate stands on paid maternity leave.

Keep in mind that we are the only industrialized country without paid maternity leave. Say that out loud, and then remind yourself it’s 2016.

Kasich is just fine with that. His response, as reported by The Columbus Dispatch:

“The one thing we need to do for working women is to give them the flexibility to be able to work at home online. The reason why that’s important is, when women take maternity leave or time to be with the children, then what happens is they fall behind on the experience level, which means that the pay becomes a differential. And we need to accommodate women who want to be at home, having a healthy baby and in fact being involved, however many years they want to take care of the family.”

I…he…but…

Sorry, so sorry, about that moment of rambling. Mine, I mean. I should have stopped banging my head against my late father’s 12-pound wrench propped up on my desk before I started typing again.

Kasich’s telecommuting suggestion would work so well for nurses, teachers, police officers, factory workers, doctors, waitresses, cashiers, baristas — you know, any woman in a job that involves something other than tapping the keys on a laptop. Did he even hear himself? I wonder that. A lot.

About those mothers who, in Kasich’s mind, could work from home: What fun for bone-tired mothers caring for newborns whose idea of sleep is a brief flutter of eyelids between feedings. Has this man never spent a day with a newborn?

As for the majority of you mothers who don’t work in jobs that allow you to telecommute: Poof. You’re invisible in Kasich Land. Problem solved.

I admit to feeling more than a little intemperate about all this because, in the past three years, our family has grown by four grandchildren. Two of them were born in the past three months.

My husband and I rushed in to help, because we could, which makes us luckier than most grandparents our age. Every time we’re with our daughters, who are fortunate enough to have jobs that let them spend the first few weeks with their babies, we leave wondering how all those mothers without their advantages manage to do it all.

We know the answer. We all do. Except John Kasich, maybe.

The heartbreaking truth is that mothers without paid maternity leave try, try, try — too often without help and without hope, too. They are never able to get ahead, and their children start out behind.

This, from the country that President Barack Obama declared during Tuesday’s State of the Union address to be “the most powerful nation on earth, period.”

Tell that to the mothers.

Better yet, prove it.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Jessica Lucia via Flickr

U.S. Alone Among Western Countries On Lack Of Paid Maternity Leave, U.N. Finds

U.S. Alone Among Western Countries On Lack Of Paid Maternity Leave, U.N. Finds

By John Zarocostas, McClatchy Foreign Staff

GENEVA — The United States is the only Western country — and one of only three in the world — that does not provide some kind of monetary payment to new mothers who’ve taken maternity leave from their jobs, a new U.N. study reports.

Two other countries share the U.S. position of providing “no cash benefits during maternity leave,” according to the report, which was released Tuesday by the International Labor Organization: Oman, an absolute monarchy in the Persian Gulf; and Papua New Guinea, a South Pacific nation where the U.S. State Department says violence against women is so common that 60 percent of men in a U.N. study acknowledged having committed a rape.

The other 182 countries surveyed provide either a Social Security-like government payment to women who’ve recently given birth or adopted a child or require employers to continue at least a percentage of the worker’s pay. In 70 countries, paid leave is also provided for fathers, the report said, including Australia, which introduced 14 days of paid paternity leave last year, and Norway, which expanded its paternity leave from 12 to 14 weeks.

The United States also provides for fewer weeks of maternity leave than what other Western countries mandate, the report said.

Under U.S. law, businesses are required to allow a new mother to take as many as 12 weeks of unpaid leave. In New Zealand, the leave is 14 weeks; in Australia, it’s 18 weeks. Switzerland has allowed women workers to take 18 weeks off since 2005; they’re paid 80 percent of their salaries under a government program similar to Social Security in the United States.

Government provides the payments in most the surveyed countries, the International Labor Organization said, with 107 nations making cash benefits available through their national social security plans. In 45 countries, the benefits are paid solely by employers, while in 30 countries employers and social security plans bear the costs.

The International Labor Organization, which has promoted better working conditions since it became the U.N.’s first specialized agency in 1946, said it prefers leave mandates that do not saddle individual companies with the cost, saying such requirements hurt businesses and potentially lead to bias against hiring women.

Germany, Europe’s largest economy, requires that mothers receive 14 weeks leave at full pay through a combination of government and employer payments. In Great Britain, a new mother is allowed to take a full year off, the report said, with payments during the first six weeks totaling 90 percent of her salary. After that, the payments are set at the equivalent of $232 per week or 90 percent of pay, whichever is less, for the next 33 weeks. The final 13 weeks of the leave are unpaid.

The report held out the prospect that the United States might one day join the rest of the world through the proposed Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act of 2013, which would establish a national paid family leave insurance program to provide 12 weeks of paid leave to recover from childbirth, serious illness, care for a sick family member, or to bond with a new baby. The legislation was introduced in December by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and has 87 sponsors, but its prospects are uncertain in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

Despite what the report described as positive movement over the last two decades in maternity leave policies around the world, the report found that financial support provided in half the countries was “neither financially adequate nor sufficiently long lasting.” It said that 830 million women workers “are not adequately covered in practice, mainly in developing countries.”

Laura Addati, a maternal protection specialist for the International Labor Organization, said that 98 countries worldwide met the organization’s standard of 14 weeks leave and that 74 countries met the standard of providing cash benefits of at least two-thirds of earnings during that time.

The report noted that five U.S. states mandate paid maternity leave — California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. It said that about 12 percent of women workers in the United States are entitled to mandated paid maternity leave.

“In order to have gender equality, you must have maternity protection,” said Shauna Olney, chief of the International Labor Organization’s gender, equality and diversity branch.

Photo via Flickr

AOL’s CEO Proves Women And Children Make Easy Scapegoats In The Workplace

AOL’s CEO Proves Women And Children Make Easy Scapegoats In The Workplace

The law has put maternity care on an equal footing with other health benefits for decades — but some executives still haven’t caught up.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong recently ignited a firestorm of criticism when he announced the company would be restructuring its retirement benefits. Armstrong explained that the financial burden of Obamacare and the deliveries of two “distressed babies,” which cost the company $1 million each, had forced the company to reduce 401(k) matching contributions:

We had to decide, do we pass the $7.1 million of Obamacare costs to our employees? Or do we try to eat as much of that as possible and cut other benefits? …Two things that happened in 2012. We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost.

Sorry, AOL employees: You can either get your expensive babies or your retirement benefits, but you can’t get both.

Armstrong has since issued a public apology and, amidst uproar from his employees, reversed the benefits decision. But his remarks remain significant, illustrating the readiness of employers to use maternity costs and the new health law as scapegoats for other business decisions that affect company profits. His comments also reflect the extent to which pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare are considered lower priorities in the workplace than other health benefits.

In an era of ever-rising health costs, it is certainly reasonable for AOL to seek ways to reduce health spending. But why single out premature births instead of, say, cancer or diabetes cases? Apparently in American corporate culture maternity coverage is still considered a “bonus” benefit that employees should feel lucky to have. You’d think this wouldn’t be the case at AOL, whose decade-old Well Baby program provides education and support for employees throughout the pre-natal and post-partum stages. Armstrong’s comments run counter to AOL’s public persona of being a company truly invested in the health and wellness of its parents and their families.

Maternity coverage should be considered a routine component of employee benefits, especially since they have been mandated in employer health plans for more than three decades. In 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) – an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act – in an effort to end pregnancy-based discrimination in the workplace. Benefits required by the PDA are both ethically sound and financially prudent. Research has shown that every dollar spent on prenatal care saves employers $3.33 in postnatal care expenses and $4.63 in long-term morbidity costs.

Based on Armstrong’s comments one might assume $1 million births a commonplace occurrence, but they aren’t. It’s true that one in every eight infants in the United States is born pre-term, but the average cost of care for the majority of those babies doesn’t come close to seven figures. Approximately 70 percent of infants admitted to the NICU stay for longer than 20 days, which typically costs between $40,000 and $80,000. The high costs associated with the two pre-term births to which Anderson refers are not the norm.

Why should the economic security of employees be first on the chopping block? Armstrong might have been a bit more introspective before publicly pointing his finger at his employees’ pre-term babies. After all, shortly before his gaffe went viral, he was in the harsh glare of the media spotlight for the overwhelming failure of Patch, a media venture he championed that lost AOL $300 million (last month the company cut its losses and sold its majority stakes in the site).  Two million dollars in NICU expenses seems quite reasonable by comparison.

AOL, like many large companies, is self-insured. As such, it directly pays employee health costs and assumes that the risk of catastrophic health events is worth the expanded choices in health benefits and the increased savings that results when income from premiums exceeds health costs. It’s unfair for companies to sacrifice the economic security of their employees when those bets don’t pay off.

It is simply dishonest to lay the blame for such losses of maternity care and Obamacare expenses. After all, the new law will improve the health of employees and generally lower employer costs in the long run by mandating the full coverage of family planning, women’s preventive health care, and extended coverage for children of employees. These measures will reduce unplanned and mistimed pregnancies (which still account for nearly half of all U.S. pregnancies) and enable women and their families to prevent and treat health conditions long before they become emergencies.

We must not regard maternity coverage as a bonus benefit. It is indeed a benefit central to employee health coverage and essential to the economic security and overall well-being of American workers and their families. The inherent value in such coverage was enshrined in laws passed more than 30 years ago, and has been reaffirmed by Obamacare. It’s long past time for executives like Armstrong to live and speak those same values when making decisions that affect the health and security of their employees.

Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. She researches and writes about access to reproductive health care in the United States. You can follow her on Twitter @dreaflynn.

Cross-posted from the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog.

The Roosevelt Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Photo: TechCruch via Flickr