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Amanda Baez is a surgical technologist, her husband is a teacher, and their second child was born in June. In the midst of the pandemic, being able to stay at home with the baby for as long as possible is critical to your child’s health.
It is also a critical financial issue for the young family. Due to the federal law on family and sick leave, the employer Baez must grant her up to 12 weeks vacation. But the hospital doesn’t have to pay her for this time. To make matters worse, her employer deducts extra money from her salary on her return to repay the cost of her share of the benefits during her unpaid weeks.
“That was the biggest disappointment,” she says.
Baez said her employer’s reasoning was that the deductions would offset the benefits she would receive during her free time. “They’re still going to pay their share of my benefits and I’m not making a paycheck” [from which they could] subtract my share, ”she said.
Before this meeting, Baez had already started preparing for the coming financial burden.
“I knew I didn’t have one [paid] Maternity leave and I knew I had to save my PTO, ”she said. “I also knew that we had to start saving immediately so that I could take a break.”
So Baez was working pregnant in a hospital that was overcrowded with COVID-19 patients. As she tried to describe the experience, she had to stop talking, she had to overcome. “Traumatic,” was the only word she could muster.
A Texas Congressman helps attempt to change parental leave rules for both fathers and mothers. US Representative Colin Allred, D-Dallas, understands the value of paid time off for new parents. He made headlines in 2019 when he became known as the first member of Congress to take paid paternity leave.
“I’ve talked a lot about paternity leave because there is still a stigma in our society that men take time to be with their children, especially in their early years” [kids’] lives, ”he told the Texas Tribune. At the end of March this year, the congressman took his second vacation.
Allred, who is already offering paid vacation to its employees, believes that this should extend to all parents in the country. This is a key question for Texas’s worst paid workers, most of them colored, and most of them literally cannot afford to take sizeable time off without pay after having a baby.
“You know, hour workers and low-wage workers are always the most exploited,” Allred said. “And we have a disproportionate number of people here in Texas who haven’t had access to it, and those are the people we need to help.”
A 2021 report by the National Partnership for Women and Families found that 61% of the workforce in the state were unable to take time off after the FMLA. Among the black families in Texas, many of the top breadwinners are women of color – 76% of black mothers, 64% of Native American mothers, and 46% of Latina mothers.
What makes the FMLA inaccessible to many Texans is its strict licensing requirements, said Jessica Mason, senior policy analyst at National Partnership and author of the report. Private employers with fewer than 50 employees, for example, are not obliged to grant their employees family leave under FMLA.
“When you have a state with lots of small businesses, it means fewer people are covered by FMLA,” Mason said. “The second half of that inaccessibility is the fact that FMLA vacation is unpaid and many of us couldn’t afford to take 12 weeks of unpaid time off from work without falling into poverty.” Baez found that they are still responsible for paying their own share of insurance premiums, according to a union leader and an FMLA fact sheet.
Paid family leave, like paid sick leave, has long been a target of unions and parental rights activists in Texas and many other states in the country. Like many other union leaders, Jeff Rotkoff, campaign leader for the Texas AFL-CIO, advocates fair, paid family vacation policies. The only way to do this, according to activists and parents like Baez, is through effective legislation – be it state or federal.
Rotkoff has spent a lot of time promoting paid sick leave at the community level. In recent years, major Texas cities like Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio have enacted ordinances requiring paid sick leave, but they have been dismissed as unconstitutional. Rotkoff said the ordinances were widespread among voters and had garnered “hundreds of thousands of signatures from registered voters in Dallas and San Antonio.”
The lawsuits that led to the repeal of the regulations were filed by business associations, Rotkoff found. But he also noted that “a lot of small businesses like these guidelines because they’re on a level playing field.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of Texan workers who do not have access to paid sickness, and all of these workers will have some version of that story – where they or someone they love gets sick for the short or long term. and they have no legal protection, they are not allowed to have an employment contract, ”added Rotkoff.
The business lobby has begun to rethink its stance on a federal paid family vacation policy that it had long opposed. In a September 2020 statement, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the U.S. Department of Labor that if federal law requires paid family leave, employers should be able to choose and maintain their own policies.
The chamber, which represents over 3 million business organizations, also recommended that all future federal programs “establish an employer coverage threshold that is small business friendly”.
In the past, Allred has co-funded laws to help Americans financially during their first year of parenthood. He paid a rare visit to a Trump-run White House to convince then-President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump that the law was vital.
He left, Allred said, because the issue of parental leave “has the potential to be non-partisan”.
“But whether it is or not, I think most Americans have already come to the decision or the realization that this is something we need,” he added.
This legislation has stalled, however, and the Dallas Democrat is now placing his hopes on President Joe Biden’s American family plan.
According to a White House fact sheet, one of the proposals in this plan is to pay the FMLA’s costs entirely through tax cuts. The $ 225 billion program would offer workers up to $ 4,000 per month in vacation pay, which would replace at least two-thirds of the average weekly wage and up to 80 percent of the weekly wage for the lowest paid workers. However, the program would be phased out, meaning parents would have to wait up to a decade to reap the benefits.
A 2020 report by the U.S. Department of Labor found that 95% of the lowest paid workers in the country do not have access to paid family vacations, and the majority of that population are women and people of color.
The National Partnership for Women and Families also suggests a national policy of paid leave as a solution.
According to their report, a federal paid family vacation policy could reduce the chances of working families in Texas facing economic uncertainty by 79%.
When families are making ends meet financially, they often fall into poverty during pregnancy because at least one parent has to take unpaid leave. “A national family paid medical leave program would really reduce the number of families who would find themselves in economic uncertainty if they had to take unpaid leave,” Mason said.
While Baez’s husband was able to take his two-week paternity leave, not all educators can.
Sydney Lynch, a Houston educator, gave birth to a child in February. She was several months pregnant before realizing that her maternity leave would be unpaid. Both Lynch and her husband took their unpaid time off. Lynch had 12 weeks through the FMLA, and her husband had eight weeks off from work.
“To find out it was unpaid was a shock to me and both of them,” she said.
Fortunately, her free time coincided with the end of the school year, so she could stay at home with her son all summer. But as the school year approached and FMLA time came to an end, Lynch reluctantly put her 6-month-old child in a daycare center.
It feels like she is “dropping her son off at the door of strangers,” she said. “I know that he will be taken care of, but there is still a lot to process and consider.”
Baez and her husband enjoyed the support of many family members when they gave birth to their first child a few years ago. But since then, many of their family members have moved away from the state, leaving the couple to take on this second birth on their own.
“If there is a family or financial emergency, I have to get back to work sooner,” she added, which in itself could put the baby at risk.
“I will go back to work in a hospital and my husband will go back to work in a school that no longer requires masks,” Baez said. “I want to try to keep my baby at home for as long as possible before putting him out.”
Disclosure: The US Chamber of Commerce financially supports The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization funded in part by donations from members, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the journalism of the Tribune. You can find a full list of them here.
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