Leaves That Pay: Employer and Worker Experiences with Paid Family Leave in California

To examine employer and worker experiences of paid family leave, the authors "conducted detailed surveys of California employers and employees in 2009 and 2010....The [employer survey] sample excluded public-sector sites, but included both private companies and nonprofit organizations.... The employee survey was a screening survey that included 500 individuals who had experienced an event in the last four years (becoming a parent or having a close family member become seriously ill) that could have triggered a paid family leave. It was conducted by telephone, with interview in both English and Spanish, between December 2009 and February 2010. The research team also conducted open-ended interviews with a subsample of 50 respondents from the employee survey. Analysis of the interview and survey data informed several key findings about employers’ and workers’ experience of the Paid Family Leave program" (p.3). (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

"[The authors] suggested five specific recommendations for improving the [Paid Family Leave] program: 1. Expand outreach- especially to low-income, Latino, and immigrant workers, and work with community groups to help spread the work about the existence of Paid Family Leave. 2. Encourage hospitals, doctors, and clinics to make application forms available in their offices and medical facilities, as well as the state’s Women, Infants and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program agencies. 3. Increase the level of wage replacement provided by the [Paid Family Leave] program from its current 55 percent of weekly earnings to two-thirds (66.7 percent) of weekly earnings to make taking family leave affordable to more workers. 4. Extend job protection to everyone who takes a [Paid Family Leave] so that all workers who need a family leave...will have a job to come back to if they need to take family leave. 5. Extend the [Paid Family Leave] program to cover all California public employees" (p.30). (Abstractor: Author)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2011
• Author(s): Appelbaum, Eileen; Milkman, Ruth
• Organizational Author(s): CEPR; Center for Women and Work, Rutgers Univ.; ILE, UCLA; Murphy Institute for Labor Studies, CUNY
• Funding Source: Ford Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, California Employment Development Department, National Institute for Child Health and Development, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Melissa Mack
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies