Hillary Clinton Campaign Press Release - Hillary Clinton's Agenda for Working Families: Helping Parents Balance Work & Family

Today in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton announced an agenda to help parents balance work and family and ensure that Americans aren't faced with a choice between keeping their job and caring for a newborn baby.

"Too many Americans feel trapped between being a good parent and being a good worker," Clinton said. "It's about time we stopped just talking about family values and started pursuing policies that truly value families. All Americans who are working hard and taking responsibility deserve the chance to do right by their children.

"With sound policies and sensible investments, we can give parents more choices to make the decisions that are best for them. We can make life a little easier for everyone – for mothers and for fathers – to do the most important job there is in any society: raising and nurturing the next generation. And that's the right decision for all of us."

Hillary's plan would set an ambitious goal for all states to implement a paid family leave program by the year 2016, and offer $1 billion per year in grants to encourage innovative paid family leave programs at the state level. Hillary would also extend the Family Medical Leave Act to cover 13 million additional workers across the country, and guarantee every American worker seven days of paid sick leave to help them deal with a health crisis faced by themselves or their children.

Access to quality, affordable child care is critical for parents seeking to fulfill their work and family obligations. With 300,000 children set to lose access to child care by 2010, Hillary's plan would increase child care funding through the Child Care and Development Block Grant and foster public-private partnerships to expand child care options at the state level.

This bold new effort will give families the support they need to more effectively balance work and family obligations. And it will work in partnership with America's businesses to ensure that pro-family work policies and increasing workplace flexibility helps improve American competitiveness and economic growth.

"Providing paid family leave and flexibility for the employees at Discovery created value for its shareholders and made the employees more loyal to the company. I believe work-life balance initiatives are as much about doing good as doing well, and these initiatives will help America's parents and help grow the bottom line," said Judith McHale, former president and CEO, Discovery Communications, Inc.

Hillary's work-family agenda will:

• Expand paid leave across the country through a new State Family Leave Innovation Fund;
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• Extend the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to cover 13 million additional American workers and guarantee workers at least 7 paid sick days per year;
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• Promote model workplaces with grants to support new workplace flexibility programs and a federal telecommuting initiative;
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• Ensure better access to affordable, high quality child care; and
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• Prevent parents from being discriminated against because of pregnancy or their caregiving responsibilities.
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Background

Families today are struggling to find quality time with their children while meeting their responsibilities to their jobs. More and more families are headed by two working parents, and today's parents work longer hours than ever before. As a result, American parents have twenty-two fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in 1969. A 2002 report by the Families and Work Institute found that 45 percent of employees say that work and family responsibilities interfere with each other, and 67 percent of working parents say they do not have enough time with their children.

Hillary Clinton believes that as these new challenges confront America's families, our policies need to catch up. That's why today she announced a new work-family agenda for our modern economy. This bold new effort will give families the support they need to more effectively balance work and family obligations. And it will work in partnership with America's businesses to ensure that pro-family work policies and increasing workplace flexibility helps improve American competitiveness and economic growth. Hillary's work-family agenda includes:

I.EXPANDING ACCESS TO LEAVE FOR WORKING FAMILIES

Family leave provides paid time off for parents to care for their newborn or adopted children or to support caregivers who are caring for elderly relatives or immediate family members. Parental leave is common in most countries, but the United States is one of only a minority of countries that provides no legal guarantee of maternity leave to new mothers—joining Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. Today, only 18 to 19 percent of women with a high school degree or less have access to paid maternity leave. For professional women, access to family leave has steadily risen – from 14 percent in the 1960s to 63 percent in the 1990s. But far too many women are still without family leave, and at the most critical time for bonding between parents and their child, many parents are forced to go directly back to work. Only 7 percent of men have access to paid paternity leave. Three out of four workers who are eligible for FMLA don't take it because it is not paid.

Hillary Clinton's national family leave initiative will: (a) set a goal of having all states adopt family leave programs by 2016; (b) provide generous grants to states to develop family leave programs in their states; and (c) establish the federal government as a model workplace in providing family leave.

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• Goal of All States Providing Family Leave by 2016 – Today, Hillary announced a goal of having all states institute some form of family leave for employees by 2016. Over the past several years, more than half of the states in the U.S. have considered family leave legislation of some form.

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• A State Family Leave Innovation Fund – To help states reach this goal, Hillary will commit $1 billion annually and ramp up as states develop initiatives in a Family Leave Innovation Fund to support state-level parental leave programs across the country. The Innovation Fund will work in partnership with states that create family leave programs by offering competitive matching grants to cover state start-up costs and a meaningful portion of program expenditures to states for these programs. The fund will not dictate from Washington what approach states should take. Instead, the fund would support all approaches to providing more leave to employees including through Temporary Disability Insurance or Unemployment Insurance programs, expansion of direct support programs like At Home Infant Care, or through individual and business tax credits. In addition, Hillary will direct the Secretary of Labor to develop model state legislation and employ technical assistance teams to provide support to states in passing and implementing such programs.

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• Make Federal Government Paid Parental Leave Model – Currently federal workers have access only to unpaid leave or they may take their accrued sick days or vacation time for maternity and paternity leave. For a worker that has little accrued leave or has a complicated pregnancy, this leave is inadequate. Hillary will make the federal government a model employer by providing paid parental leave for federal workers.

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• Expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to Cover Employers with 25 Workers -- The FMLA, which provides 12 weeks of job-protected leave to new parents, those with a serious medical condition or those who are taking care of an immediate family member, has disproved critics and established itself as a driver of productivity and employee retention. The wide majority of firms covered by the FLMA have reported that the act had either a positive or neutral effect on profitability and growth. Yet the FMLA is incomplete. It only covers employees in firms with more than 50 workers, an exclusion that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers and working women—because they are more likely to work for small employers. Hillary is proposing to lower the threshold to companies with 25 or more workers, a change that would cover 13 million additional workers.

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• Ensuring all Americans have Access to Sick Days -- Forty-eight percent of private sector workers and 57 million total workers in the United States have no paid sick days at all. And 86 million workers do not have paid sick days that can be used to care for sick children. Hillary is proposing to make 7 sick days a year – to care for yourself or your children – standard. When people go to work ill or worrying about their sick child, they make other people sick and they run the risk of affecting the productivity of the organization as a whole.

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• Empowering Employees to Request Workplace Flexibility – Hillary is proposing to empower employees to request workplace flexibility, such as change in work hours, telecommuting, working part-time or job-sharing. The proposal will not require that employers accept these requests, but simply that employers seriously consider them. However, by letting employees request leave, the provision can help change the working environment to one that is more responsive of the needs of parents. In the United Kingdom, after adoption of a similar law, 7 out of 10 requests made by employees were granted, and 80% of employers surveyed felt that flexible workplace arrangements were easily accommodated in their organization.

II. PROMOTING MODEL WORKPLACES IN CORPORATE AMERICA

Employers have found that investing in work-family initiatives helps the bottom line through better retention and productivity. In a survey of 200 "Fortune 1000" companies that allowed flexible work arrangements through telecommuting, approximately 60% of employers reported that enabling greater flexibility for employees lead to reduced absenteeism and productivity increases of at least 20%. Approximately 65% of respondents reported improved retention, reduced costs for office space and reduced stress. Nearly 80% of respondents indicated that flexible arrangements improved employee morale.

Today's initiatives will encourage employers to take the steps to help their employees balance work and family. As President, Hillary will:

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• Establish a new public-private partnership program on model workplaces at the Department of Labor. The partnership will establish Model Workplace awards to highlight businesses that establish innovative workplace flexibility programs. It will provide grants to these and other businesses to expand their models to serve more employees. And the partnership will work with these businesses to document and share their models with other employers. The partnership will promote the most innovative workplace approaches in areas such as telecommuting; reduced work schedules; flexible arrival/departure times that allow for redefining work-day and work-week; offering on-site services such as child care; providing predictable work schedules; and allowing people to trade shifts without going through a bureaucratic process.

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• Promote telecommuting by encouraging its use at federal agencies and supporting state and local initiatives. Telecommuting is becoming an increasingly attractive option for employers and employees. Well-designed telecommuting programs can be a triple win—giving workers much-needed flexibility; allowing employers to reduce office space needs; and improving the environment by reducing rush-hour car trips and lowering car emissions. Hillary Clinton will promote telecommuting by requiring the federal agencies to set specific telecommuting goals for their workforces, and she will require that each agency task a senior manager with oversight of its telecommuting policies. Hillary will also invest up to $50 million annually in state and local telecommuting initiatives.

III. BETTER ACCESS TO HIGHER QUALITY CHILD CARE

Hillary has worked on expanding access and improving the quality of child care in our country for decades. The Bush Administration has essentially frozen the level of child care funding for the last eight years. As a result, the real purchasing power of child care subsidies has fallen significantly. According to the Bush Administration's own estimates, 300,000 children will lose child care assistance by 2010, and 150,000 have already lost child care assistance since 2000.

Hillary believes we need to increase child care funding through the Child Care and Development Block Grant and return the program to it's original intent: to serve working families. She will also work with Congress to reform the Dependent Care Tax Credit to address its shortcomings. And she will improve the quality of child care by investing in:

• Helping states improve and enforce licensing and safety standards;
• Supporting innovative public-private partnerships that increase the supply of affordable, high quality child care for working families;
• Promoting and supporting quality rating systems that help families evaluate programs; and
• Supporting workforce initiatives that help child care providers get the right training.

Enabling Working Parents to Take Leave to Stay Home with Their Children. Hillary has long supported giving every parent a real choice about whether to stay home and care for their children full time or work outside the home. That is why she is proposing to allow qualifying, low-income parents who want to stay at home rather than place their children in child care to receive child care subsidies through the Child Care Development Block Grant. This program would award grants to states to support stay-at-home parents. Currently, only parents who place their children in child care are eligible to receive assistance to the Child Care Development Block Grant.

IV. PROHIBITING PARENTAL DISCRIMINATION

Respecting Parents. Most people believe that current law already protects parents from being discriminated against because they are parents with caregiving responsibilities, but unfortunately too many mothers and fathers are not protected. A pregnant woman should not be fired because her employer does not allow any employee to take unpaid leave for a temporary disability. A father should not be fired because he has responsibilities toward his children. As President, Hillary will work to prohibit discrimination against parents.

Achieving work family balance goals consistent with fiscal discipline: The total cost of Hillary Clinton's work-family agenda is approximately $1.75 billion per year. Hillary will finance this cost without increasing the deficit by dedicating the revenue from enacting the anti-tax sheltering reform referred to as "codifying the economic substance doctrine." By establishing a uniform definition of a tax shelter, this reform will help crack down on abusive tax transactions that have no economic purpose. It will raise $2 billion in 2012 and about $26 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.