Across the Political Spectrum, Workers Need Paid Leave Now

In just a matter of days, despite the violent and disturbing last-ditch efforts by the current president and his followers to overturn a legitimate election, Joe Biden will become president of the United States. And, with new Democratic control of both the House and Senate, and Biden’s $775 billion vision to support caregivers and working families, policymakers are in position to finally put care squarely in the center of the national agenda.

The timing is urgent. Over the past year, parents have struggled adapting to new work protocols—from Zoom meetings to memorizing new workplace health and safety rules—while balancing care for themselves, screaming toddlers or family members facing new health challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has made a long invisible “care crisis” acutely visible. Yet policymakers have continued to stall in delivering long-term meaningful change to support care and paid leave systems in the United States. What policymakers seem not to realize and a recent Better Life Lab report made clear, is that there is already widespread common ground in support of care and easing work-family strain across the political spectrum.

For decades caregiving has been relegated to the sidelines as a niche “women’s issue” and, as a result, investment in and support for care and caregivers has been largely ignored at the federal level. The United States remains alone among competitive economies for failing to provide federal paid family and medical leave or invest in child care and early care and learning to support working families. Could we be at a crucial pivot point now where that will change?

If so, there is ample evidence that people across the political spectrum would support it. In a recent nationally representative survey the Better Life Lab team at New America found that Americans are unified in their support for and valuing of families and caregivers regardless of political beliefs. Democrats and Republicans experience work-care conflict equally. More than two-thirds of the caregivers among our respondents said they were employed at the same time as providing care. Of those working caregivers, an astonishing two-thirds, regardless of gender or political party, had been forced to miss work to provide care.

Not only is caregiving a cornerstone of a healthy economy, decades of polling data, in addition to our survey, show widespread bipartisan support for gender-equal caregiving. Despite intensifying divisiveness in partisan politics, recent polling data found that nearly 80 percent of voters—Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—support permanent paid family and medical leave for people with child or family care obligations or long-term illness.

Republicans and Democrats agree that the number one reason men do not take paid leave to care for others is because they cannot afford to.

There has long been support for public policies for working families on the Democratic side. And Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan promises to create 3 million new jobs in caregiving and education and establish 12 weeks of federal paid family and medical leave. This ambitious plan outlines a comprehensive approach to supporting working caregivers and individuals, which, if acted on, could allow workers to better balance their work and family responsibilities.

Yet even politicians and strategists on the Republican side are beginning to recognize how COVID-19 has placed the care crisis on center stage. Abby McCloskey, an economist and GOP policy advisor, emphasized during a recent Better Life Lab Crisis Conversations podcast episode how more policymakers, activists and thinkers on the GOP side are beginning to advocate for caregiving reform. “When you look at the GOP the last decade, you think of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus and [the] Grover Norquist tax pledge” not to raise taxes, McCloskey said. “There's been a resistance not just to caregiving programs, but to any new federal program out of the belief that the debt is already at unprecedented and continuing to grow levels, [and that] the federal government is maybe more the source of our problems than the solution. That said, I am a firm believer that that is changing, specifically in the area of care.”

McCloskey pointed to how the personal care experiences of GOP leaders like Ivanka Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, one of the few GOP women in Congress who has children, have begun to reshape their views about public care policy. “These are people who have had personal experience and run up against the system and have seen with their own two eyes that, ‘Wait, this isn't work like how it should work,’” McCloskey said. “And if it's unfair for me, how much more unfair is it for people who have less resources and connections than I do?’”

Indeed, Meghan McCain, conservative co-host of The View and daughter of the late GOP Sen. John McCain, came out in favor of a national paid maternity leave policy earlier this week after she’d had a child and realized her paid leave was a luxury many other women in the United States do not have. (One in four employed mothers return to work within two weeks.)

But the question is how will these grand plans to invest in care systems fare in a bitterly divided Congress? Congress failed to extend the country’s first-ever emergency paid family leave and paid sick days legislation, a move that left 87 million workers without paid leave when the law expired on Dec. 31. Now, even with a 50-50 split Senate after the Georgia runoff elections, Democrats and Republicans will still need 60 votes to pass most legislation—and with the current state of intense political polarization, it is unclear whether lawmakers will come to a unified agreement over paid leave proposals.

In Congress, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed bills that partially or fully address U.S. workers’ need for paid leave. On the Democratic side, Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand proposed the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act, which would provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to all workers through a new social insurance program that workers and employers pay into—it would only cost a typical worker about $1.50 a week. However, this policy has gained very limited bipartisan traction, with one Republican cosponsor, and some business endorsers. Without more GOP support this proposal could stall, and families would continue to face familiar and unfortunate trade-offs (pay the bills or care for a child, keep up at work or check in on grandma).

Republican paid leave proposals, like the ones offered by Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Mike Lee, and Sen. Joni Ernst, are limited and only allow for workers to borrow from their own Social Security funds following the birth of their child. Democrats do not support these proposals since they exclude people who need a paid leave policy to care for aging or sick family members, and new parents who use the benefit would have to work past retirement age and receive lower lifetime benefits—an unacceptable consequence for working families already struggling economically.

[L]arge majorities across the political spectrum support public policies like paid family and medical leave, and general investment and support in care, caregiving, and caregivers.

Our nationally representative survey found that both Republicans and Democrats alike say they need leave from work to attend to care responsibilities. There were no differences by party on who has actually taken leave from work to provide care. Yet fewer than half of Democrats and Republicans said they had access to employer-provided paid family and medical leave.

Both Republicans (72 percent) and Democrats (74 percent) agree that the number one reason men do not take paid leave to care for others is because they cannot afford to. Being seen as “manly” or the traditional gender role of men as breadwinners—often viewed as the culprit, particularly in conservative circles—was actually the least common answer for both groups, suggesting economic factors influence men’s decisions to a greater degree than adhering to traditional gender norms.

Perhaps most importantly, more than half of men across party ideologies who have ever provided care expressed feeling burned out from care work. In focus groups, men and women across the political spectrum expressed a need for better access to care providers and workplace flexibility policies to help them cope.

With so many Americans facing impossible caregiving challenges, politicians have no excuse for failing to pass paid family and medical leave to allow workers to take time off when they need to for themselves or to be there for their kids or other family members who may have lost their usual care support. They have no excuse for failing to support working individuals and families with caregiving responsibilities. This is a critical moment. Inadequate care systems were a harsh reality even before COVID-19 shuttered schools and child care centers, closed businesses and left families without their usual means of juggling family responsibilities with their paid work. Political leaders have failed them in the midst of a pandemic when workers across the political spectrum have made their needs known. Whether policymakers will finally take action, whether care systems will actually change under Biden and a new Congress remains to be seen. But the truth is, if families are to thrive, change must come. The public is ready to support action revamping our caregiving systems. And the consequences of failing them again are too great.