In its first year, the leave program took in more than 12,000 claims for benefits, more than two-thirds of which were for parental leave. But according to Silverman, Black workers in particular have an outsized need for medical leave. Black workers in D.C. accounted for 38 percent of all paid leave claims in the first year of the program, but made up 56 percent of all medical leave claims. In the district’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, Black workers made up 41 percent of medical leave claims, but in predominantly white neighborhoods, that number fell to less than 25 percent.
“The expansion of paid leave in DC is a win not just for the working families of DC, but also for the paid leave movement as a whole,” said Josephine Kalipeni, executive director of Family Values @ Work. “For nearly 20 years, we’ve worked alongside our partners across the nation to secure paid leave programs that will offer 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, the gold standard. The impact of this win goes beyond DC. While many people live in DC, many more people work and live in surrounding states that do not have paid family and medical leave policies.”
Among care advocates, equitable paid leave policy needs to meet the triple A standard: Accessible, meaning it will cover all workers for all kinds of leave; Affordable, meaning progressive wage replacement and job security for those on leave; Adequate, meaning the leave is long enough to allow time for bonding and healing.
On the federal level, President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda originally called for the “gold standard” of 12 weeks of paid sick and parental leave, as well as progressive wage replacement that would have covered up to 90 percent of earnings for the lowest-income workers and self-employed workers. But similar to the fight for paid leave policy on the state level, the federal push for universal paid leave faced intense opposition from Republicans and some Democrats. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), for instance, has expressed concerns about the policy’s impact on the federal deficit and unfounded claims that workers would use the leave to go on “hunting trips.”
But local elected officials and advocates urge federal lawmakers to examine how a universal paid leave policy would not only benefit workers and their loved ones, but employers as well.
Whatever happens on the federal level, advocates are working tirelessly on the state level to introduce paid leave legislation that meets the “triple A” standard. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and even Manchin’s home state of West Virginia have all recently introduced paid leave legislation.