This isn’t, sadly, surprising news – but a study came out last week showing that the U.S. has some of the weakest workplace policies in the world for families. According to an AP article on the Harvard/McGill University study, we lag “far behind virtually all wealthy countries with regard to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, paid sick days and support for breast-feeding… Notably, it says the U.S. is one of only five countries out of 173 in the survey that does not guarantee some form of paid maternity leave; the others are Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.” The article goes on to say that the Labor Department is considering scaling back the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gives workers up to a total of 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year. How depressing!

Q and I are lucky in that we live in California – the only state that provides paid family leave. (And our employers have been great to us, also.) But what about people who live elsewhere? Or who can’t afford to take unpaid time off to be with their child? Even before I became a mom, I recognized the importance of family-friendly workplaces – and I can’t believe the U.S. isn’t stepping up and enacting new, better policies!

(Okay, I’m done with my political rant now.) 

-M

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under 05.Two to three months. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.