Why so few take paid parental leave Research by Ariel Pihl and Gaetano Basso cited by The Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2016
A day after Alex Gustafson’s wife gave birth to their daughter in
December, he officially began the 12 weeks of fully paid family
leave offered by Automattic Inc., the San Francisco tech company
where he works.
Anthony Goytia of La Puente wishes he had that option. When his
wife gave birth to their daughter in April, they lost about $550
of monthly income. So Goytia started working a second job at
Macy’s to supplement his early shift unloading trucks at UPS.
Only 25% to 40% of California mothers who are eligible for state
leave actually take it, according to a report by the UC Davis
Center for Poverty Research. Overall, less than 2% of all workers
in the state used the benefit from 2013 to 2014.
Paid Family Leave (PFL) provides income for workers to take time
off to care for a newborn or sick loved one. The U.S. is the only
industrialized country without national PFL. Moreover,
job-protected leave is not universal. A large body of research on
policies outside the U.S. suggests that paid and protected leave
help workers remain in the labor force. Increasing researchers’
access to governmental administrative data would further show how
to improve these policies for U.S. workers. Limited existing data
from California PFL show that the majority of new mothers do not
take advantage of this policy, and that take-up is even lower
among low-wage women.
