http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121822/paid-leave-goes-progressive-pipe-dream-political-reality
his January, in his State of the Union address, President Obama did something that no president has ever done in a venue of this importance: He called for paid family leave. “We are the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers. Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave—forty-three million. Think about that,” he said.
The White House believes it has an opportunity to push for comprehensive paid leave. “The economy is recovering,” Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett told me in April. “Employers can take a deep breath, step back, and say, ‘Now that we’ve survived and come out of a very challenging time, what can we do to ensure our companies are globally competitive?’ Plus there’s the change in the demography of the workplace—now women comprise over half of the college-educated workplace.” The time, it seems, is now, although some might wonder what took so long.
It is astonishing, when you think about it, that paid leave has only entered the national political discourse in a meaningful way in 2015, with little help until recently from major political figures. The price paid by Americans who lack the right to take paid time off to recover from childbirth, to care for newborns, or to respond to the calamities of fallible health—our own and that of our loved ones—could not be higher. We have no choice but to neglect the needs of our families, or our work, or both. After unemployment, births and family illnesses are a leading cause of what is known as “poverty spells”—when one’s income dips below the minimum needed to afford food and shelter. Nationally, about 9 percent of workers who take time to care for a loved one end up on public assistance, and only 12 percent of private-sector workers are covered by formal paid leave policies, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Compensation Survey.