Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration extended paid maternity and parental leave to state employees for the first time.
The governor and the cabinet approved the move in a meeting on Sept. 18, Mr. DeSantis’s office announced.
The governor and cabinet additionally approved rules to allow paid family leave insurance in Florida, “providing a mechanism for Florida employers to offer similar benefits through supplemental insurance benefits for their own employees,” the governor’s office said.
“When I became governor, I made it a priority to champion policies that support families and empower parents,” Mr. DeSantis said in a statement released by his office. “As a father of three, I know how instrumental those first weeks are for new parents and their children.”
“The most important job I will ever have is being a mother to Madison, Mason and Mamie,” said First Lady Casey DeSantis. “In Florida, we believe family is everything, which is why we are proud to provide much needed maternal and family leave to Florida families.”
Eligible state employees can receive paid maternity leave for up to seven weeks and parental leave for two weeks, the governor’s office said. Mothers can combine the two benefits for a total of nine weeks of paid leave following a baby’s birth. To help bond with a new child, they can add sick leave for a maximum of four months off, the governor’s office said.
State employees previously could use sick and annual leave or unpaid leave following their child’s birth, the office said. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act has since 1993 provided for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, and Florida’s Family Supportive Work Program guaranteed them six months with the right to return to their positions or comparable jobs afterward.
“Compared to other Southeastern states, this is the most robust paid leave policy for mothers following birth,” the governor’s office said in a written statement.
“DMS is proud to support Florida’s state employees, and this new rule would allow growing families committed to public service the ability to invest in their family during the first months of their baby’s life,” said Department of Management Services Secretary Pedro Allende. “This rule supports Governor DeSantis’s family-first focus and enhances DMS’s mission of attracting and retaining a highly qualified state workforce.”
The policy applies to about 83,000 state workers within the State Personnel System, a DMS spokesman told The Epoch Times in an email. He added it will have little financial impact on the state as workers on leave continue to draw their same salaries.
While unpaid family leave became federal law three decades ago, public employers had been slow to take up the issue. It wasn’t that pressing because generous sick leave policies were often available to public employees, Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
But some momentum started even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and increased during it, with a demand for more family-friendly and flexible policies, she said. “If you want to be competitive, you need to be providing these benefits.”
“They’re doing what the private sector does,” she said of Florida and other states offering paid maternity and family leave. “They’re acting as a private sector company would.”
The Trump administration enacted paid family leave for federal employees, she said.
Ms. Greszler said she didn’t favor “one-size-fits-all mandates” run by the government.
“It’s crucial for workers and employers to get policies that are the most flexible and accommodating and the least disruptive,” she said.
Policies imposed by the government across the board tend to be loaded with red tape. The District of Columbia has such a policy in force, she said.
“If you want to take paid family leave, you need to know weeks in advance. You need to specify the exact days. You have to take it in full day increments”—a problem if, say, a baby has a routine doctor appointment taking a couple of hours, she said.
“If you do any work on a day that was claimed as paid family leave, you have to repay the benefits. It makes it really cumbersome for workers and employers.”
Ms. Greszler cited the example of a co-worker emailing or calling the colleague on leave to ask a question about doing their job.
“So much red tape adds bureaucracy and inefficiency, as opposed to the employer and employee doing what’s best for them.”
Many private-sector firms already offer paid family leave, she said. The number that do increased in the past five years from 16 to 27 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ms. Greszler said. The bureau sets a high bar for reporting that, meaning numerous other companies do it but haven’t met the complete reporting requirement.
“The momentum is there and it will continue to tick upwards,” she said.
Ms. Greszler said that while the time off is important for parental bonding and maternal recovery from childbirth, there’s a limit to how much employers can offer.
“You don’t want to say, just because it’s beneficial, we'll do it for six months, or a year, or just pay mothers to stay home and raise their kids,” she said. “We have to recognize it’s a cost to an employer, not just in the paycheck [they’re paying to an absent worker] but how to keep things operating when you’re missing workers who create goods and services of value.”
The Gates Foundation, at one point, generously offered a year of paid leave. But they had to abandon it, as so many workers were absent, they couldn’t carry out their mission, she said. “And they have enough money, that wasn’t the problem. It made the operational aspect so difficult.”
A good way for businesses to cope is to hire independent contractors to fill the absent worker’s position for two or three months, she said.
However, the federal government has proposed rules making it far harder to classify someone as an independent contractor. The rules have already gone through public comment, that phase having ended in December 2022, and may be finalized soon, she said.
If so, that would affect 60 million to 65 million people working as independent contractors, full or part-time, she said.
“They want fewer independent contractors, and more people classified as employees so they can be unionized,” she said. “You can’t unionize an independent contractor.” The rules would also crack down on temporary workers.
The proposed rules would impose a complex test for classifying someone as an independent contractor. Someone hired for two or three months would still have to become a W-2 employee and go through far more paperwork, she said. “If implemented nationwide, it will drastically raise the cost to employers of getting someone to fill in.”
Vicki Shabo—senior fellow for gender equity, paid leave and care policy, and strategy at the New America Foundation in Washington—acknowledged the increase in private companies offering paid leave but said it was still far too low.
“Just 27 percent of workers have access to paid family leave at their job,” she told The Epoch Times. And those that do tend to be higher paid. Workers with wages in the bottom 10 percent hardly ever have the benefit available, their number increasing from 4 percent to 5 percent over the last five years.
A year ago, Virginia did the same thing Florida just did for the private sector, allowing insurance companies to offer paid family leave insurance plans, she said. “What we’ve seen in Virginia is that only one insurer had applied to even offer the product.”
“Policy makers can say they have worked to make paid leave available, but whether anyone will actually offer one [is debatable],” she said.
Employees are left to the “boss lottery,” whether their employer will offer such a plan, she said. “We know most don’t.”
Ms. Shabo said she didn’t think the higher cost of state-imposed family leave on the private sector was a disincentive to employers locating or remaining in the 13 states, along with the District of Columbia, that have such laws. They tend to be blue states, she said, such as California, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Washington.
“The cost to employers is very small, 1 percent of payroll or less,” said Ms. Shabo, who has been following this issue for ten years. She said 3 to 5 percent of state employees in states with the benefit take paid leave in any given year. The highest figure in 2021, the height of the pandemic, was Rhode Island with 6.2 percent.
Ms. Shabo gave a different interpretation of what happened at the Gates Foundation. She said they cut the benefit from a year to six months to push gender equity over concerns that more women were using it than men.
