Happy birthday to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), the last truly employee friendly piece of legislation that Congress passed! The passage of the FMLA was a victory for employees which gave full-time workers (employed at companies with 50 employees or more, who have worked for at least 1,250 hours over at least a 12 month period) unpaid leave for up to twelve weeks.
Now that I have given the nod to the passage of the FMLA, I want to point out that the year is 2015 and the United States is the only industrialized nation on the planet that does not offer paid sick leave or paid parental leave. Just so that we’re clear about who the United States is lagging behind, let me offer some brief comparisons.
Iceland offers twelve days of paid sick leave while Denmark offers two weeks. Switzerland offers three weeks of paid sick leave while Australia offers ten days. Norway offers 16 paid sick days while Germany and Austria mandate that employers must pay their workers full salaries for up to six weeks of sick leave. New Zealand offers five paid sick days and Luxembourg offers seventy-seven. The United States requires no paid sick leave to be offered to workers.
The U.S. stacks up even worse when we consider paid parental leave. According to a 2014 report from the International Labor Organization (ILO), the United Nations agency which promotes labor rights, only two of 185 countries and territories studied provide no statutory cash benefits during maternity leave. You know what I’m going to say next: the United States is one of the two countries (out of 185 studied) that provides no cash benefits for maternity leave. Rest assured, the other country is very comparable to the United States in terms of economic viability, population, advancement in technology, and eradication of extreme poverty. Can you guess who shares the noble title of providing no paid maternity leave for its workers? It’s Papa New Guinea.
Other interesting facts about Papa New Guinea are that its population is 7.321 million people, forty percent of its population is extremely impoverished, and its Gross National Income per capita in U.S. dollars is $2,010. The United States, on the other hand, is home to 316.1 million people and its Gross National Income per capita is $53,470.
So, happy birthday to the FMLA. Here’s to hoping that soon the United States will join the hundreds of other countries who recognize the importance of paid sick and parental leave.
We can and must do better.
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