Starting Jan. 1, Ikea’s 14,000 salaried and hourly workers in the U.S. will receive up to four months of paid parental leave. Lars Petersson, head of Ikea’s U.S. operations, told the Wall Street Journal that the company expects the program to improve productivity and reduce turnover.
Too often new parents feel terrified—and not just about the daunting prospect of raising a child. Many of them must grapple with a gut-wrenching decision: How quickly can they leave their newborn to get back to their job? Few can afford to go without salaries for long or to weaken their future wage-earning potential by leaving their job altogether.
As National Adoption Month comes to a close, we reflected on local employers who’ve made an impact in the lives of employees who adopt. Extending paid parental leave is a trend several large banks have joined this year to build in more flexibility and financial support for employees to care for their families.
Statement of Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families
“We need a health secretary who will fight to ensure high quality care is available and affordable to all and who will make women’s health needs, including reproductive health, a priority,” Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said in a statement. “This is essential to strengthening families, our economy and the country.”
When taking time off after giving birth means risking a paycheck, everything becomes arduous — healing, bonding with the baby, breastfeeding. Governments need to invest in guaranteed paid family and medical leave and other policies so that families don’t have to win the job lottery to give their children the healthiest start to life.
[Parents are] making crazy decisions to try and figure out how to keep their jobs, make enough money to provide for their families and still have time to spend with their kids. Nearly one out of every four women who gives birth in the United States goes back to work just two weeks later.
“This is about the worst news they could get heading into Thanksgiving and the holiday season,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a Washington, D.C.-based group that promotes workplace fairness.
New Poll Shows Significant Disparities in Paid Sick Days Access by Income and Region
“We applaud CMS for using innovations in technology to help clinicians select and report meaningful measures for the quality of care patients receive,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. “APIs hold a lot of promise for helping consumers access and use information in a more actionable and easy-to-understand way, which can lead to improved outcomes for both patients and health care providers.”
In recognition of National Prematurity Awareness Month, National Partnership president Debra Ness and Dr. Sam Ho, chief medical officer of UnitedHealthcare, give tips on how expectant mothers and their families can increase the likelihood of a safe and healthy pregnancy, delivery and early postnatal period.
While a number of major companies have made significant strides in providing paid family leave this year, and the benefits of these policies are widely reported, a majority of the U.S.’s top employers still lag far behind.
The paid leave arms race isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While some employers—notably those in consulting and tech—have recently made splashy updates to their leave policies, the vast majority are staying quiet.
“We saw in poll after poll, voters saying this was an issue they cared about,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. While many such policies have been supported by progressive candidates for decades, “the fact that it came up in the general election by the Republican candidate was totally unprecedented.”
For women who struggle with conflicts between work and home life, there is a moment in the film, “Equity,” that is ruefully familiar. The drama takes place at an investment bank where ambitious women are delicately managing career moves.
British actress Keira Knightley is Harper’s Bazaar UK December cover star, and yesterday, she received the magazine’s Theatre Icon award during their Women of the Year Awards ceremony. Inside the magazine’s pages, Knightley touched on her personal life by commenting on the state of parental leave and child care.
National Partnership President Debra Ness discusses new data on pregnancy discrimination in the workplace and why we need Congress to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
There was a time not long ago when employees were supposed to leave family issues at home. The stress of caring for an elderly parent, a sick spouse, or a newborn was something better left outside the confines of the office. It was even taboo to take too much time off to deal with something personal, other than a short maternity leave.
New York state and San Francisco passed new paid leave laws in April. Etsy, Twitter and Deloitte are some of the latest companies to implement generous paid leave policies that raise the bar for all employers. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made headlines when he took two months off for the birth of his daughter.
For many people, economic policy brings to mind issues like taxes, trade, and interest rates—the subjects that dominate the financial news. Child care and family leave go into another basket typically conceived of as “women’s issues” and implicitly treated as irrelevant to economic growth and prosperity.
