Stories about paid leave going wrong are having a moment. Workers allegedly taking vacations while on leave. Warnings about fraud. Claims that programs are being “gamed” or crushing employers.
It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also a familiar one. And honestly? It doesn’t hold up.
This isn’t the first time these claims have surfaced. And it’s not the first time the data has told a different story.
What the narrative suggests
The story goes something like this: employees are collecting benefits they shouldn’t. Workers are treating leave like paid vacation. The whole system is being abused.
These claims are built on anecdotes, not evidence – stories that are easy to understand, easy to repeat and easy to amplify, even if they don’t have much basis in fact. Often, these stories come from large business associations and chambers of commerce, whose perspectives are treated as representative of employers as a whole.
The reality is that very few to no workers are faking a pregnancy or a cancer diagnosis to get a few weeks away from work; and paid leave programs have safeguards built in like medical certification requirements that protect against that potential misuse. But once these stories take hold, they shape how policymakers and the public understand these programs. Policymakers end up chasing an imagined problem while real improvements get left on the shelf. And the public misses the actual story: what it looks like when these programs work, and how many people they’re quietly helping every day.
A recent piece in a Minnesota newspaper reported a single claim from one state Chamber of Commerce spokesperson on one local TV segment who said that employees were attending concerts and music festivals while on leave – with no specifics and no evidence it actually happened. Just an assertion from an industry group with a clear stake in the outcome, treated as established fact. By the time an editorial board picked it up, it had become the lead example of the program’s supposed failures. The piece cited no workers who used the program, no independent researchers and no businesses that had adapted successfully. Every voice came from one side, again with no evidence backing up their claim. The anecdote hadn’t gotten more true in the retelling, it had just gotten more authoritative.
Minnesota’s own oversight committee had held a hearing just weeks earlier where the state laid out an extensive, multi-layered fraud prevention system. Identity verification, healthcare provider certification, employer review and confirmation, random audits, a fraud reporting portal and more were included. They even led integration with electronic health records – making them the first state in the country to do so. These systems were built to catch possible misuse before it even launched and yet that context was entirely absent from the coverage.
What’s striking isn’t just that these arguments recur – it’s how consistent the language is across states. “Burdensome.” “Unsustainable.” “Operational burden.” These are different states, with different economies, different program designs and different political contexts – and yet, the same words are used to describe them. These are not independent, local concerns. These are coordinated messages, amplified by coverage that rarely stops to ask: compared to what? Compared to who?
What employers are actually saying
But when you look beyond the headlines – and into the data (we do love data) – a different picture emerges.
Nearly eight in 10 small business owners support a national paid family and medical leave program, and more than 40 percent of small business owners have needed to take leave themselves.
In a recent Minnesota employer survey, more than three-quarters of employers reported not contesting or appealing a single leave claim. Only a small share reported formally challenging claims at all.
In California, the first state to pass paid leave, the early warnings sounded exactly like what we’re hearing now: concerns about costs, disruption and misuse. But after implementation, nearly 90 percent of businesses said the program had a positive or neutral effect on productivity. 99 percent said the same about morale. And the California Society for Human Resource Management – which had initially opposed the law – later declared it was less onerous than predicted, with few businesses reporting challenges.
New Jersey showed the same pattern. A survey conducted for the New Jersey Business and Industry Association found businesses of all sizes reported little trouble adjusting to the state’s law. In New York, 93 percent of employers were in compliance within one year of implementation, and a study of smaller firms found the majority were supportive – with particular benefits for firms with 50 to 99 employees in handling long absences.
Colorado offers perhaps the clearest proof yet that the opposition arguments don’t hold up. Voters passed the state’s paid leave program by ballot initiative in 2020 – by more than 15 percentage points over sustained business industry opposition arguing the costs would be unsustainable. When benefits launched in 2024, the state successfully processed more than 135,000 claims and distributed $687 million in benefits. The program is financially stable enough that employer fees are dropping in 2026. The predicted fiscal crisis never arrived.
The same playbook is running in states still deciding whether to pass paid leave at all.
In Nevada, a coalition of business groups opposed a 2025 paid leave bill, arguing it would impose “significant financial and operational burdens” at a time when businesses were “grappling with rising costs.” The governor vetoed it, blocking coverage for nearly a million workers. There was never a chance to prove the naysayers wrong.
In Pennsylvania, where a paid leave bill cleared the state House for the first time in seven years of debate, 81 percent of voters – including 67 percent of Republicans – support the policy. And yet the opposition narrative remains focused on cost and burden.
The arc is consistent across every state: dire warnings before implementation, real but manageable growing pains early on, and then, employers adapt, concerns stabilize and the predicted harms fail to materialize.
Every large system will have edge cases. That’s not a sign of failure, it’s a sign that the system exists at scale. Paid leave programs aren’t operating on the honor system. Medical certifications, employer verification, and claims review aren’t afterthoughts – they’re standard features, built in from the start. And it shows: isolated misuse attempts happen, but they’re far from typical, and the systems to catch them are already doing their job. If misuse were widespread, we’d expect employers to be flagging it. They aren’t.
What’s actually worth fixing
When employers describe their real concerns, they sound a lot more familiar and far less outlandish: navigating administrative complexity, coordinating benefits, and managing staffing when someone’s out on leave. These are not signs of a system being abused. They are the predictable growing pains of implementing a new program – and real ones worth solving. That work doesn’t get done when the conversation is stuck on problems that aren’t there.
States like Washington have already begun identifying best practices: small business grants to offset temporary costs, dedicated outreach and technical support for small employers, and advisory committees that include both worker and employer representatives. That’s the work worth doing.
What’s at stake
Paid leave programs exist to do something simple and essential: give people the time they need to care for themselves and their families without risking their economic security. Right now, 73 percent of workers – more than 100 million people – don’t have access to paid family leave through their jobs. The programs we’re talking about dismantling are the exception, not the rule.
And by all available evidence, that’s exactly what’s happening. Workers are using leave to recover from illness, care for loved ones, and bond with new children – the uses these programs were designed for.
We know what happens when these policies are given time to work. Employers adapt. Programs stabilize. Former opponents revise their assessments. The dire predictions fade.
We should keep improving how paid leave is implemented. We should listen to employees, state paid leave administrators, and employers to address real operational challenges. But we also need to be clear-eyed about what the data actually shows.
Because the goal should be to fix what needs improving – not to dismantle what’s working based on stories we’ve heard before, and that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Now is the time to stand for a federal paid leave program. Learn more about the growing coalition of businesses championing paid leave for all at advancingpaidleave.org.
