Paid leave is a pandemic godsend for Washington workers. Don’t mess with success
Seldom will you hear the words “good fortune” associated with 2020, the year (hopefully the only one) that was hijacked by the coronavirus pandemic. But in retrospect, Washingtonians should agree that the launch of our state’s Paid Family & Medical Leave program a year ago was a piece of tremendous good fortune.
“These benefits could not have come at a more important time in our history,” program director Lisa Kissler told members of a House committee earlier this month.
She wasn’t exaggerating. Paid leave has provided a financial lifeline to scores of working families dealing with unforeseen COVID-19 infections and quarantines; a total of $613 million in partial wage replacement was dispensed in 2020 to workers tending to a family member’s serious health condition, the birth of a child or a military duty. The program remains solvent and full-steam ahead for 2021.
Paid leave is a bipartisan Washington success story, but it didn’t come easily or quickly. A dozen years passed between the Legislature’s initial approval of a paid-leave law in 2007 — high-minded, but unfunded — and the carefully negotiated system of employer and employee premiums that went into effect in 2019. Another year passed before workers could start accessing benefits, topping out at 12 weeks in most cases.
It was a fragile compromise built on painstaking negotiations between labor and business, which dragged into two special sessions of the 2017 Legislature.
Elected leaders should resist the temptation to change the program at such an uncertain stage — in the second year of operation, in the midst of a pandemic.
But that’s what several Democratic lawmakers want to do this year. They’re proposing to loosen paid-leave eligibility, despite it not having been vetted by members of a citizen advisory board.
Businesses across the spectrum — food production, manufacturing, hospitality, small businesses — have raised red flags, with good reason.
“The law is brand new, it’s two years old, it’s only been paying benefits for a year. It’s still in its shakedown period,” Gary Smith, executive director of the Independent Business Association, testified last week in a Senate committee hearing. “It’s not ready to become a catch-all program.”
Expanding it would be particularly onerous for small businesses because they haven’t received the grants they were promised to ease the transition.
Washington was the fifth state to launch a paid-leave program; four more have since followed.
Private and public-sector employees were able to start accessing benefits last January, less than two months before Gov. Jay Inslee issued his first coronavirus emergency decree.
Its solid performance stands in contrast with the nightmares that thousands of jobless workers have faced trying to collect state and federal unemployment benefits, a safety net also run by the Washington Employment Security Department.
By year’s end, nearly 100,000 families had used the paid-leave program. Pierce County residents were among the biggest beneficiaries, second only to King County; in the first nine months of 2020, 16,597 Pierce residents tapped into their benefits, according to the state.
Those benefits would become more widely available under Senate Bill 5097, which had a hearing Monday in the Senate Labor, Commerce & Tribal Affairs Committee.
The bill would expand the definition of family member to include non-blood relatives; it also would reduce the amount of time workers must be employed before they qualify for job protection and health benefits while on leave.
The proposed changes are born of good intentions and could make the program more equitable, especially to nontraditional families and people of color.
“When we rely on nuclear-family definitions in public policy, we perpetuate a system where workers are paying into a social insurance program that they are unable to access,” Linet Madeja-Bravo of South King County testified Monday. “This is the definition of inequity.”
Madeja-Bravo, a member of the activist group MomsRising, added that many people of color in Washington’s workforce are afraid to take leave for fear they won’t have a job to return to.
We don’t dispute any of this. The program is a work in progress. White people comprised 72 percent of the beneficiaries last year; Kissler and her team have identified the need to break down barriers, such as reaching workers with limited English skills.
All should be able to take time off for life’s most joyous occasions and difficult ordeals.
But wholesale changes should wait for the end of the pandemic. Let the paid-leave program run for a full year under normal conditions before tinkering with its carefully negotiated terms.
Or else this Washington success story could be short-lived.