In addition to vacation and sick-time leave, City of Seattle employees will soon get four weeks of paid parental leave. That leave can be used for birth, adoption or a new foster child.
The program may cost up to $1.35 million, with temporary workers coming in to replace employees on leave. At his press conference, Mayor Ed Murray addressed the benefits, which included giving parents time to bond and decreasing the likelihood that an employee would leave permanently.
The program was widely supported by the Seattle City Council, with five council members at Mayor Ed Murray’s announcement ceremony.
Council member Jean Godden said at the press conference that this will make better fathers, according to the Seattle P-I.
Seattle will now be among a few cities in the country to offer paid maternity leave, but as a whole, the United States is the only developed country in the world with no paid parental leave. President Barack Obama recently announced a similar program for federal workers, giving them six weeks of paid leave.
Murray and Godden wrote in a special column for The Seattle Times that they hoped this would encourage other employers around the city and region to adopt similar policies. This is exactly what must happen. Women have been forced to choose between a career and parenthood for too long, and now that women have been given the option to have both, they often leave work, unpaid, to spend time with their newborns. And men don’t receive any benefits, either, usually returning to work immediately. As Murray and Gooden noted, this policy will protect a woman’s earnings and place in the workforce.
“It’s time to catch up with the rest of the world and invest in our talented employees,” Godden and Murray wrote. “For too long, women have shouldered unfair expectations and burdens and had to make difficult choices between career and family.”
Company is sparse for countries joining the United States in offering no paid parental leave: Only Suriname, Liberia, Palau, Papua New Ginea, Nauru, Western Samoa and Tonga don’t. Every other country in the world offers some form of paid leave; some countries offer as much as 26 weeks or more.
Seattle has been leading the conversation in many of these national conversations right now, like the minimum wage debate, and this is certainly one place that others should get behind. It’s time for the most powerful nation to catch up with the rest of the world.