Massive rant because finals!
So this last half-semester I’ve been in both a family connections class and a women and gender studies class, which has been an interesting (and a bit confusing) of a convergence because they intersect like. A Lot. More times than not, really. Women’s rights are so closely tied to the family structure and dynamics of childbearing and rearing that occasionally I’ll forget what class something is for.
For my WGS final, I wrote a letter to the secretary of employee benefits at the Department of Labor about the current laws about family/maternity leave. It was interesting to do the research for it and I wanted to rant about it more so here we are, my old, dear blog<3!
So, first source I got was, of course Pew, which then sourced me back to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The OECD is apart of 41 countries, including the US, and out of all 41, the United States of America is the only one that doesn’t mandate even a single day of paid parental leave. Yes, we have 12 weeks of UNPAID leave, but not a day of paid leave. Meanwhile, by the 2022 data, Greece offers 43 weeks of paid leave. 28 weeks of full-rate equivalent (the same money they’d get if they were working) and 15 weeks of non-full-rate. But still paid, for 43 weeks of no work, for time with your child. Now, mind you, that’s only maternity leave for Greece, only 2.8 weeks for paid paternity/partner’s birth leave.
Mind you, the least amount of paid leave, other than the 0 on the US, is 6 weeks for both mother and father from Portugal. Half of our mandated leave, but it is fully paid, of the first month and a half of the child’s life.
What I find interesting, especially from this family connections class, is how clearly maternity/parental leave is connected to the shift from women being the sole homemakers to working outside of the home. It was a 1993 act that put into law the unpaid leave framework. Essentially, meant to say “you can’t fire someone for taking off this maximum amount of time when they have a baby”. Job protected leave, is what it’s called, and that puts a lot of it into perspective for me.
They, being the people new mothers would be working for, didn’t want them to take the leave (which is discussed in this blog post: Great Place to Work: How Much Leave Do Companies Give because paid leave doesn’t count if you don’t feel like you can take it). So Clinton, in his first law passed as president, mandated that a new parent could take up to 12 weeks away from work without facing repercussions from their workplace upon their return.
I don’t have any grand conclusions for this whole thing, but I do find it really interesting how, despite often claiming to be the land of opportunity, the US is the only country within the OECB to offer 0 paid parental leave. Especially in this current political climate, of people wanting more conservative values. They still refuse to offer things to uphold it. A lot like those “traditional men” who want a woman to cook and clean and take care of them, but aren’t willing to do the work needed to financially support them enough for her to not have to work. Hypocritical of the things they harp on hand over fist.
