NATIONAL ENTITLEMENT TO PAID FAMILY AND PARENTAL LEAVE

WHEREAS, health should be understood as a collective rather than an individual attribute; the well-being of a society depends on the welfare of each person in the society; and the health of infants and children, the elderly and the infirm is not solely the responsibility of the woman or the family but of the entire society; and

WHEREAS, recognizing the shared benefit and responsibility for childcare and the protection of pregnancy, nearly every country in the world provides some form of paid maternity, parental and/or family leave; and 

WHEREAS, the United States is one of only five countries out of 173 countries surveyed worldwide that does not provide any federal entitlement to paid maternity leave—the others being Lesotho, Swaziland, Liberia and Papua-New Guinea (source: Heymann, Earle and Hayes, Work, Family, and Equity Index, Harvard and McGill Universities, 2007); and

WHEREAS, the United States does not provide any federal entitlement to paid leave for family medical care; and

WHEREAS, the United States is still the only industrialized country in the world that fails to provide universal healthcare; and

WHEREAS, more than 50 million people in the United States provide care for chronically ill, disabled or aged family members during any given year (source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services); and

WHEREAS, the value of services family caregivers provide free is estimated to be $306 billion a year—almost twice as much as is spent on paid homecare and home nursing services combined (source: Peter S. Arno, “Economic Value of Informal Caregiving,” 2006); and

WHEREAS, approximately 60 percent of family caregivers are women, and women who are family caregivers are 2.5 times more likely than noncaregivers to live in poverty and five times more likely to receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI); and

WHEREAS, American business loses as much as $34 billion a year because of employees’ need to care for loved ones aged 50 or older; and

WHEREAS, numerous studies of the effect of providing predictable, paid parental leave show that such leave tends to result in higher employment levels and salaries for women (source: C. Winegarden and P. Bracy, “Demographic Consequences of Maternity-Leave Programs in Industrial Countries: Evidence from Fixed-Effect Models,” 6 S. Econ. J 1020 [1995]); and

WHEREAS, the largest-ever longitudinal study of gender differences in career paths in higher education employment shows that women are disproportionately disadvantaged by the lack of paid parental leave (source: Mary Ann Mason, Do Babies Matter? University of California, 2006); and

WHEREAS, 73 percent of AFT members are women, many of whom have chosen to combine work with parenthood or have combined work and family caregiving; and

WHEREAS, both women and men are affected by the provision of paid parental and family leave, especially as the number of women in paid employment has risen dramatically in the last half-century; and

WHEREAS, all children—whether their parents are mothers or fathers, biological or adoptive, in traditional or nontraditional families—are entitled to care by parents who are provided with paid leave for that purpose; and

WHEREAS, all individuals are entitled to care for their loved ones and to be cared for themselves when they are ill—without suffering the penalty of lost wages, lost opportunity for promotion and poverty; and

WHEREAS, the American Federation of Teachers, as a union whose membership is predominantly involved in the education of children and young adults, and in the healthcare of people of all ages, takes a special interest in the welfare of children; and

WHEREAS, AFT, because of the people it represents and the professions in which we are engaged, is ideally positioned to take the lead in a visionary new legislation on federally provided paid parental and family leave:

RESOLVED, that the American Federation of Teachers place high on its legislative agenda for the new Congress a demand for universal paid family and parental leave in the United States, that AFT urge any presidential candidate it endorses to support such leave, and that AFT lead its union affiliates to mount a vigorous, coordinated campaign to win such legislation in the next congressional session.