Fmla

Twenty years ago last February; President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The FMLA allows many employees who have been in their jobs for a year, working for employers with 50 or more workers, to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to care for a new baby or a spouse, child or parent with a serious health condition – or to address their own serious health problem. Since it became law in 1993, workers in this country have used it to take leave. Those leave-takers are mothers caring for new babies, fathers at the bedsides of sons undergoing chemotherapy, and adult children caring for mothers recovering from a major surgery. Each time someone takes leave under the FMLA, they know that their health insurance will continue and their job will be there when they return. There is no question that the FMLA was huge innovation, helping millions of families without impairing businesses.
Yet the United States is the one of few developed countries that does not provide paid parental leave to women workers (or their spouses) to bear and care for children. With little public debate, the United States has chosen a fundamentally different approach to maternity leave than the rest of the developed world. The United States and Australia are the only industrialized countries that don't provide paid leave for new mothers nationally, though there are exceptions in some U.S. states. To put it another way, out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States one of those that does not. There have been several attempts at introducing paid maternity leave in the United States. The Clinton administration wanted to allow states to use unemployment funds for maternity leaves, but it was not able to pass through the Bush administration after disapproval from business groups who were concerned with increased contribution to state unemployment funds.
The Family and Medical Leave