[V]ermont would be the sixth state to offer paid family leave if the state Senate passes a House bill that was approved last year.
Under the 1992 federal Family and Medical Leave Act, employees have the right to take up to 12 weeks off to care for a child, spouse or family member and retain benefits, such as health care, but there is no government or mandated employer plan to subsidize that time off.
Legislation passed by the House last year creates a state insurance program that provides paid support for certain employees who take six weeks off to care for a newborn, a foster child or family members who are seriously ill. The program is only available to workers who work 30 hours or more per week and are employed by businesses that have 10 or more employees.
House Majority Leader Jill Krowinski said only 60 percent of Americans have access to unpaid leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave act. Vermonters do not have access to paid leave. The legislation would give more employees access to the benefit.
“All of us want a Vermont where families and communities can thrive and where the Vermont dream is accessible to everyone,” Krowinski said at a press conference Thursday.
The House proposal, H.196, would be funded by a 0.14 percent payroll tax paid by employees only. The payroll tax is applied up to $150,000 of income. The state would collect about $15.9 million for the paid leave benefit annually. The program would cost $1.2 million a year to administer, according to the Vermont Joint Fiscal Office.
Employees would receive 80 percent of their pay during the leave period, up to two times the livable wage set by the Joint Fiscal Office, not to exceed $1,040 per week. Workers must have been employed for 12 months to qualify. About 123,000 workers would be eligible for the benefit, according to information from Main Street Alliance, an advocacy group that is pushing for the initiative. Information about what percentage of those employees would avail themselves of paid leave were not provided.
While paid leave has been a priority for House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, the legislation faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, where the No. 1 goal this year is raising the minimum wage from $10.50 per hour to $15 per hour by 2024.
Senate leader Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, has said the minimum wage increase will benefit tens of thousands of people immediately, while the paid leave initiative is a regressive tax on workers and not everyone benefits. Ashe won’t block paid leave, but he won’t put his political muscle behind it either.
There is a companion bill in the Senate, S.82, that will be taken up by the Senate Economic Development Committee. The Senate bill targets an even broader portion of Vermont’s workforce by expanding paid family leave to include workers with businesses that have fewer than five employees.
Few employers voluntarily offer paid leave. Those that do offer the perk use it as a recruiting tool. Sivan Cotel, owner of Stonecutter Spirits, a local business in Middlebury, and a member of Vermont Main Street Alliance, said that he was able to get recent graduates to stay in Vermont and work for his company because he offered paid leave.
Cotel believes paid leave and other legislative initiatives, including an increase in the minimum wage and pay parity for women can help to boost the state’s workforce.
“We can make these programs statewide differentiators that help us grow Vermont in thoughtful and meaningful ways,” he said. “These efforts will attract more workers for Vermont by leveling the playing field for all businesses.”
States that already have paid family and medical leave programs include New York, Rhode Island, Washington, California, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.
According to Jackson Brainerd, a policy associate at the National Conference of State Legislatures, Vermont’s 80 percent wage replacement level is higher than the average of 50 percent to 60 percent offered by the other states.
“If the wage replacement is low, lower income workers won’t take the leave because the wage is not enough for them to live on,” Brainerd said.
Anne Ward, a Berlin resident who attended the Statehouse press conference, said the paid leave bill is especially important for foster families.
With 1,200 children in the custody of the state, foster parents are needed now more than ever, she said.
When Ward took time off from work to care for a foster child, she faced a major financial setback. Foster families need financial support to care for children with emotional and physical challenges.
“We need to do better for Vermont’s children,” she said.
The press conference was hosted by the Vermont Main Street Alliance, a group that advocates policy that interests a network of small business owners in Vermont. The alliance says 90 percent of Vermonters in the workforce are employed by companies with 20 or fewer employees.
Correction: A statement by Rep. Jill Klimowski on numbers of people covered under family leave policies has been corrected. She said that 60 percent of Americans do not have access to unpaid family and medical leave, not that 40 percent of Vermonters do not have access to paid leave.
