Pandemic Paid Leave Is Available: Why Some Parents Aren’t Taking It

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/parenting/pandemic-paid-leave.html

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With many summer camps, schools and day care centers still closed, Hannah Richards is one of millions of working parents in America juggling child care with work for the indefinite future. A mom of two from Cumberland, Maine, Richards works full time for a small marketing firm while her husband owns and manages a grocery store. She has struggled to attend half a dozen daily online meetings for work while still helping her 6-year-old with lessons and keeping her 4-year-old entertained.

In April, a month after the shutdown began, her C.E.O. informed her that because she had kids at home she qualified for 12 weeks of emergency paid leave under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act.

Richards thought long and hard about it. Most of the leave would amount to two-thirds of her salary, which would be a financial strain for her family, and after those 12 weeks, then what? Camps were closed and there is no guarantee that schools will reopen this fall. And if her company faced layoffs, an absent employee might be the first to go. Richards also felt loyalty to her co-workers, and committed to the success of her employee-owned company.

“It’s a close-knit company and we are all friends with each other,” she said. “It feels like shifting the burden rather than eliminating it.”

Instead of taking leave, Richards asked her sister-in-law to watch her kids while she worked.

Advocates believe there are likely millions of other parents like Richards, who qualify for emergency paid leave but are not taking it. Some of those are aware of the benefit, but many are not. According to polling data from the National Partnership for Women & Families, over half of Americans either don’t know it exists or feel they don’t qualify.

Because there is no required outreach or education, business owners may not realize that it’s the government — not the businesses — who pay for it. Also, much of the American workforce has never had access to paid leave at their jobs (only 17 percent of workers had it in 2018), so “most people don’t even know to ask,” said Pronita Gupta, a policy expert at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an anti-poverty nonprofit.

But even among those who are aware they qualify for emergency paid leave, many are reluctant to take it for the same reasons as Richards: avoiding a pay cut, maintaining job security as the nation faces high unemployment, and uncertainty about what happens when those 12 weeks are up.

Rebecca works in fundraising for a philanthropic organization in the D.C. area. A mother of three kids under eight, she learned she qualified for emergency paid leave by searching her company’s online payroll system and discovering she could request time off for child care reasons related to the pandemic.

But Rebecca, who requested only her first name be used to avoid embarrassing her employer, still isn’t planning to take time off. Neither is her husband, a private-school teacher who conducts classroom lessons via Zoom on a fixed schedule. He would also qualify for the leave but opted not to take it since there were no other teachers to cover his classes.

In the meantime, Rebecca is navigating around her schedule’s flexibility, arranging calls while her children are either entertaining themselves, watching TV or playing outside with neighbors.

How an employer presents the benefit can also make a difference to whether people feel they can take it. Jesse Kirsch, an art director at U.Group, a technology firm in Washington D.C., began receiving daily emails from his office with Covid-19 updates, which included details of the emergency paid leave provisions once they were available.

Kirsch had been planning to use some of his accrued paid time off to help manage his sons, ages 6 and 4, and trade off shifts with his wife, a freelance graphic designer. “But as soon as I learned about it, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take it.’” It helped that a senior person at the company sent an email discussing her own anxiety about the pandemic. “She was encouraging us to take personal time in order to feel better,” Kirsch said. And for him, that is exactly what he is doing.

Kirsch now takes Fridays off to manage his kids’ care and give his wife time to work, and he is willing to dip into his own accrued leave if the benefit should run out before they go back to school. He’s not worried about falling behind, or producing anything other than high quality work. “They know they can count on me for whatever they need. They don’t give me pushback,” he said.

National surveys shows that men, like Rebecca’s husband and Kirsch, anticipate needing leave at the same rates as women, but take it less often, citing pressure to be the primary breadwinners. Advocates say that one way to improve the existing benefits, so that women are not the only ones taking paid leave or dropping out of the workforce entirely, is to offer full wage replacement rather than the two-thirds the act now outlines. Increasing the wage replacement allows dads to feel comfortable taking paid leave, and one study suggested that many men say they needed 90 percent or more of their salary in order to justify taking paid family leave.

Concerns about the uncertain job market and career setbacks also feed into this reluctance, even as paid leave laws explicitly state that employees who do utilize the benefit are protected from retaliation.

“We have millions of people filing unemployment claims, and people who still have jobs are afraid they are going to lose them and don’t want to do anything to jeopardize them,” said Julie Kashen, director of women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank that studies inequality. This disproportionately affects women, who are bearing the brunt of the job and wage losses since they make up the majority of employees in fields like hospitality, retail, food service, home health care, child care and education (with women of color especially affected). At home, women are still doing the bulk of the child care and housework, though men are increasing their participation.

There is still time for eligible employees to take the paid leave and for employers to learn if their employees are eligible, or to educate employees about their options. The provisions do not end until the end of 2020, and there is still a long summer ahead with few camp options available.

Going forward, Gupta recommended the U.S. create a national paid leave system for all employees to stay home when they are sick or to care for family, without worrying that doing so puts them at risk. “Imagine if we had a Family Medical Leave Act that was automatically triggered for 14 days in a pandemic or a crisis like this,” she said. “People would have automatically stayed home instead of going to work and continuing to spread the contagion.”

Rebecca Gale is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., who writes about parenting, family and gender issues. Her reporting was supported by the Better Life Lab at the New America.