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The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees employees 12 weeks of unpaid leave. However, studies find either small or insignificant effects of the legislation on employment, work, leave‐taking, and wages. Perhaps employees are unable to use the leave because it is unpaid or they do not need family leave because they already may take off work via vacation, sick leave, and disability leave policies. If so, then family leave legislation may have increased employer‐provided family leave without corresponding effects on employment‐related outcomes. This article examines family leave legislation's effects on employers' family leave policies, finding positive effects. (JEL J1, J2, J3)

The debate on whether employers should be mandated by law to provide unpaid leave for employees to care for dependent family members touches on conflicts between women's rights as citizens and their roles in the family. Because opponents have claimed that family leave is not good for business, proponents have been forced to defend the regulation of business. By reframing the issue in terms of gender justice, the discourse would be broadened to include the health and social policy context that leaves so many women with the stark choice of caregiving or employment .

The problem of combining work and family life is perhaps the central challenge for the contemporary American family. In this Article, I evaluate and defend government provision of paid family leave, a benefit that would allow workers to take compensated time off from work for purposes of family caregiving. A legal intervention in the arena of work-family accommodation can only build on some prior normative understanding of the family, and embedded within that, contested value choices about women's identities and entitlements in workplace, family, and society. I am not the first legal scholar to advocate paid family leave of some kind.The additional contribution here is to offer a normative defense of such a program based on its potential to increase the workforce participation of those who bear the principal obligation of caregiving – women. This, I argue, will increase equality of economic opportunity and the distribution of social power associated with status in paid labor markets. It also will enhance women's capacity to determine the conditions of their lives. In advocating paid family leave, I distinguish myself from those who would make family care subsidies available equally to caregivers who do and do not participate in the paid workforce, and from those who would shun workplace accommodations in favor of more "commodified" caregiving institutions external to the family. Paid family leave is particularly valuable, I argue, because other possible alternatives, such as daycare, cannot entirely replicate the value of personal time away from work to engage directly in family caregiving. For women currently working who want to give personal care to family members but cannot afford adequate time off to do so, paid family leave will improve their quality of life and benefit those they care for. For women on the margin between working and staying home, the availability of paid leave may make market work more feasible and attractive, and as a result, increase their attachment to the workforce. At the same time, we must be wary of overly generous leave provision. Very generous leave provisions might encourage such lengthy absences from the job as to undermine women's development of human capital and connection to the workforce. Further, the method used to finance the program must be sensitive to important issues of distributive justice and the challenge of ensuring that the program confers gains on its intended beneficiaries. The government should spread at least some of the costs of the program beyond those workers – women in their childbearing years – most likely to take leave. Paid family leave would have two components. It would have a family illness leave component, i.e., temporary paid leave for someone who is not herself incapacitated, but who has a familial obligation to another person who is seriously ill or disabled. It would also have a parental leave component, covering non-medical temporary leave for purposes of allowing parents to nurture newborn children. The Family and Medical Leave Act ("FMLA") mandates that employers give up to twelve weeks of job-protected leave per year to workers who need to care for a newborn child or their own serious illness or the illness of a family member. Coverage limitations mean that only about half of all workers, and less than one-third of steadily employed new mothers, receive these protections. More importantly, the law does not require wage replacement. This makes the American system the least generous of industrialized nations. All western European nations have programs that give women workers the right to at least three months paid maternity leave, with as much as a year or more in some countries, as well as paid parental leave – for either parent.

AbstractPaid family leave (PFL) aims to help working parents balance their careers and family responsibilities while also improving the well‐being of infants. Using linked U.S. birth and infant death data with a difference‐in‐differences framework, I find that a 6‐week PFL in California reduced the post‐neonatal mortality rate by 0.135‐ that is, it saved approximately 339 infant lives. There were fewer deaths from health‐related causes and larger effects for infants with married mothers and for infant boys. Additional checks and placebo examinations indicate that the observed effect is not due to contemporaneous shocks but rather is causal.

Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum examine one of California's most important recent legislative initiatives: the paid family leave law that was passed in 2002 and took effect in mid-2004. California is the first state in the nation to provide paid family leave to its workers. The authors review the developments leading to the establishment of this new program, which builds on California's longstanding State Disability Insurance system. The paid leave program covers virtually all private sector workers (unlike the federal Family and Medical Leave Act which is restricted to relatively large employers), and thus should in principle provide universal coverage. The authors use data from two surveys: the Golden Bear Omnibus survey, which investigated public attitudes about paid leave, public awareness of the state's new paid family leave law, employees' previous experience with family and medical leave, and employees' expectations about future needs for leave; and the Survey of California Establishments, which examined the extent to which California employers provided family and medical leave benefits beyond what was legally required prior to the implementation of the new law, as well as employers' recent experience with such leaves. The authors' analysis reveals that relatively few Californians—only about one in five—are aware that the new paid family leave program exists. Moreover, workers with the most family-friendly employers are more likely to learn about the paid family leave law than are those who are employed by "low-road" companies and who are most in need of paid leave. The danger is that the benefits from the new program will go disproportionately to the state's more privileged workers, many of whom already enjoy the functional equivalent of paid family leave via other employer-sponsored fringe benefits. If nothing is done to increase the visibility of the state's much-celebrated paid family leave program among low-wage workers, immigrants, and others who need it most, the already entrenched inequality that is so deeply embedded in the state's labor market and wider social organization may become characteristic of this arena as well, despite the fact that the clear intent of the law is to provide universal coverage.

AbstractBetween 1987 and 1993 twenty states and the federal government adopted family leave policies. None included any wage replacement. The similarities and differences among these policies are discussed within the context of six major categories: employees covered, company size, length of leave, eligibility, coverage of benefits, and job guarantee. Also discussed is the feasibility of adopting some type of wage replacement as well as the future of family leave in light of the changing demographics of America's families.

Americans today are struggling more than ever with taking family leave and the financial ramifications that come with it. As more women populate the workforce and as our society grows in age, federal and state bills are being passed that allow employees to take the necessary leave to tend to new children, serious illnesses and elder care. California was the first state to pass a paid family leave law that provides employees with up to six weeks of paid leave. The details of Senate Bill 1661, the impact and future consequences have been outlined. The conclusion is that California has once again completed meaningful and effective legislation to improve citizen's way of life.