Don't Gut Family and Medical Leave
From Eileen Appelbaum and Ellen Bravo
Released May 25, 2005
Yet today, tens of millions of workers and their families stand to lose out because of actions being pushed by special interests. The same people who blocked family leave for eight years are now engineering an attempt to gut its protections.
These lobbyists are pressuring the Bush administration to deny time off for any illness that knocks you out of work (or a child out of school) for less than ten days, rather than the three or more required by current law. A worker with an emergency appendectomy who misses a few days of work, someone who needs to care for a child with a life-threatening bout of asthma, someone whose parent has a stroke and needs help getting settled could all be fired if these people have their way.
Yes, fired. Because one of the greatest benefits of the FMLA has been the guarantee that you could return to your job.
Imagine the flu epidemic lands on your doorstep. You take the advice of the Center for Disease Control to stay home for a week so you don’t contaminate your co-workers. Yet if the special interest lobbyists succeed, your job could be in jeopardy.
Hard-working employees have been able to stay employed and care for a loved one, thanks to the FMLA. Employers win, too, when valued employees don’t lose their jobs when they need to accompany a child with cancer to weekly chemo treatments or an injured spouse to physical therapy.
Right now, you can take just the number of hours you need for treatments like this, minimizing the loss of pay to yourself and the strain on employers and co-workers. Yet the FMLA opponents want to compel you to use at least half a day or a day at a time, whether or not you need to be out that long. The result? Fewer workers will be able to take the time they need, and the absence of those who do will be more disruptive.
This move to dismantle the provisions of family medical leave is one of the most anti-family proposals ever put forward. It flies in the face of all the research conducted by the bipartisan Commission on Leave and many other experts. It ignores public opinion, which overwhelmingly supports the FMLA.
The proposed reversal of key elements of the law will be especially devastating to low-paid workers, who generally lack sick or personal days. Weakening family leave would make it harder for these workers to stay employed and move out of poverty.
In order to strengthen working families, we need to go forward, not backward. At a time when more families than ever are caring for young children or elderly parents or both, we need to allow leave to more people for more reasons. And we need to make it affordable.
We call on the Bush administration to stand by America’s families and defend the FMLA from any attempts to undercut it.
Eileen Appelbaum is a professor at Rutgers University and Director of the Center for Women and Work. Ellen Bravo is the outgoing director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women; she served on the bipartisan Commission on Leave. An earlier version of this op-ed appeared in the New Jersey Star Ledger.
