Include Us All! A Call for Paid Leave in the Latinx Community
Blog Post
April 6, 2021
Martin Juarez and his wife Teresa Servin-Juarez live in Kansas with their four girls, ages 2-13. As a machinist for the hospital system, Martin works tirelessly to ensure that their medical equipment, including respirators, are fully functioning. When Martin tested positive for COVID-19 in November 2020, his workplace was able to offer him emergency paid leave to take time off of his essential work and focus on recovery. “It helped with our finances, so we could keep up with basic necessities*,” Teresa said. “The girls and I didn’t get sick because we took precautions, and after two weeks he was able to return to work easily after he felt better.*”
For those who had access, like Martin and Teresa’s family, the temporary Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), which Congress passed in the Spring of 2020 at the height of the pandemic, offered critical emergency paid sick and caregiving leave to families in need. Martin and Teresa were able to recover relatively quickly from COVID-19-related illness. Without the benefit, Martin and Teresa’s family could have faced a financially precarious situation, “If Martin didn’t have access to paid leave, we might have had to ask for a loan. It was incredibly important for us to receive it.*” Teresa shared.
The United States is alone among advanced economies for failing to offer national paid family and medical leave, paid sick leave or paid vacation leave. And though FFCRA enabled workers like Martin to take 10 days of paid sick leave, and gave workers struggling with childcare 10 weeks of paid caregiving leave, the emergency law expired in December. Neither Congress nor the Biden administration included paid family leave in the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package passed in March. Nor was it included in Biden's recent $2 trillion infrastructure proposal. But Biden has said he supports a national permanent paid family and medical leave program and is expected to include it in his third major stimulus and relief plan in the coming weeks..
While some in the diverse Latinx community may have access to paid leave through work or have had access through emergency provisions like Martin and Teresa’s family, for many others immigration status, language barriers, and widespread systemic inequality through job segregation pose major hurdles to this crucial benefit. Just 20 percent of the U.S. private sector workforce has access to paid family leave through their employers’ voluntary programs. Latinx workers in particular are significantly less likely to have access to the benefit—according to Pew Research Center 23 percent of Hispanic workers said they needed to take leave but weren’t able to, compared to 10 percent of their white, non-Hispanic counterparts. And, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families, more than half of Latinx workers, about 15 million people, cannot earn a single paid sick day through work.
Jessica Mason, senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women and Families, explained that while the experiences in the Latinx community vary widely, there is a general trend toward Latinx workers being pushed into jobs that are lower paid with fewer benefits in industries like hospitality, retail, agriculture, and health care. And, Jessica shared, “Workers who are undocumented may be especially reluctant to ask for rights at work because they are especially vulnerable to retaliation, risking their job and deportation potentially, and that poses a barrier to paid leave.” Even when paid leave benefits include all workers regardless of immigration status, 43 percent of Latinx workers found it difficult to learn about those leave benefits and the fear of public charge also plays a role in minimizing utilization of the benefit.
Paid leave allows workers to take time off of paid work to care for their families or tend to their own health with partial wage replacement to enable them to do so. Many state public programs also ensure that jobs are protected so workers can take leave and return to work knowing they and their families are supported in both the short and long term. Yet, the Just Recovery Survey, a report on how economic and health policies affect worker well-being and agency, reveals that over half of Latinx women anticipate losing paid work due to unpaid caregiving responsibilities during COVID-19. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Latinx workers, particularly women, have experienced disproportionately high unemployment rates, women made up 100 percent of U.S. job losses in December and Latinx women accounted for 45 percent of that job loss, a troubling trend that exacerbates inequality. Unlike unpaid leave, which only those with resources can tend to afford, research shows paid leave promotes equity, and how beneficial to individual and family health and wellbeing it can be.
When the emergency paid leave provisions in the Family First Coronavirus Response Act expired at the end of last year many workers lost access to the benefit completely, if they were even able to qualify in the first place.
Erendira Zamacona, mother to three children and worker leader for the National Domestic Workers Alliance in Pennsylvania, was excluded from emergency paid caregiving leave provisions in the FFCRA which carved out small employers. She already had little to no work protections as a house cleaner and nanny even before the pandemic since U.S. labor laws intentionally leave out domestic workers. When the pandemic hit, her children were required to stay home from school for their own health and safety. Erendira found it increasingly difficult to balance caretaking while working and searching for clients in a tough job market where worried families quarantined and distanced from house cleaning services and childcare workers. “To be honest, both having to take care of my kids and the pandemic overall made it really hard to find more work, especially because my kids rely on us having work to pay for food and rent.*” Erendira shared.
With mounting bills and no clear end to the pandemic, Erendira’s stress heightened as she lost most of her work. She has only regained a fraction of the work hours she used to have, now only working on weekends for a few hours a month. Access to paid caregiving leave at the onset of the pandemic would have allowed Erendira the financial support to step back from her paid work and focus on caregiving for a while, then return to her work, which includes the difficult task of searching for clients, with greater financial stability. “This economic crisis is something not only I’m facing but my colleagues are facing.*” Erendira said, “It’s so difficult to talk about, it’s been so hard—I wasn’t covered by any of those emergency benefits, not even the stimulus checks. How is it that my kids are citizens, and I pay taxes, how was I excluded from this?*”
More robust policy measures could address this inequality and allow more Latinx workers to thrive. By prioritizing improved pathways to citizenship, clear and widespread job and wage protections, and inclusive worker and family support, policymakers can reduce the gap between who has access to critical benefits like paid family and medical leave and sick days and who does not. Erendira emphasized the need for policymakers to step in and support workers, “It would have been helpful to have job protections, unemployment or paid time off.*” she related, “There are thousands of domestic workers who do this essential work and we need an economic transformation that includes all of us. Regardless of having citizenship or not, we are humans.*”