Over at the Tennessee Guerilla Women, there’s a call for minimum paid maternity leave in the US. The crapness of maternity benefits in the US reminds me in many ways why I’m lucky to be having my baby here.
Everyone in the UK who’s been employed for a minimum length of time (and I think it’s basically so you weren’t pregnant when you were hired) gets 6 weeks paid leave at 90% of their salary plus and additional 34 weeks (it’s around that) at £108 a week (that’s about $200).
I get more because my employer offers more – and I’ve been working for them for quite some time. They aren’t the most generous and they aren’t the most stingy. They are a bit lazy – and haven’t come out with a new policy since the law changed – but they tell me that the proposed policy will be that I receive my statutory 90% for the first six weeks and then I’ll get the 34 weeks at half my salary plus that £108 a week. So essentially I’ll get 9 months with not bad pay considering I’ll not be doing any work for them. I can take an additional 3 months off with no pay, but they have to hold my job for me – and then I can take my remaining vacation days – which will accrue as normal while I’m off, and well, I get a fair bit of leave. Twenty-eight days in fact.
I can also take parental leave of a fairly generous amount of time up until my kid is 5. You don’t get paid though – so I haven’t looked into it. But basically you can use that time if your kid gets critically ill and your job is protected – in some ways it’s probably not much different from the Family Medical Leave Act.
They also have to at least consider my request for part time work after I go back to work – and any refusal must be in writing and needs to be based on a solid business case. My husband has the same rights. My employers are pretty flexible, so I’m sure I won’t have any trouble going to part time – or even working 5 days over 4 – which isn’t impossible on my short contractual working week. (Although as a professional I usually work quite a bit more than my mandated 35 hours a week – but if you’re an American reader – I’d bet good money I don’t work as much as you do.) I will be urging the Vol-in-Law to do the 5 days over 4 thing though since he’s an academic- this would mean he’d be guaranteed to have a lecture free/ meeting free day and that would be one less day we’d have to pay exhorbitant London day care costs.
Demographic decline
The UK has one of the less generous maternity laws in Europe. Places with declining population (or fear of a declining white population – like France) tend to have better maternity coverage. It’s not a chicken and egg thing – policy makers are trying to convince women like me (reasonably well paid, well-educated) to breed by paying us off. The policy doesn’t actually work. A big deterrent for us breeding was making sure that we could keep our house after the maternity leave was over and we had to pay for child care. Child care in the US – my sense is – is more accessible and cheaper than it is in the UK. We also had to clear the regressive taxation in the lower reaches of tax scale. For the aspirant middle classes, breeding young is very expensive indeed.
The US is one of the few advanced countries that are still breeding at at least replacement rate. And I suspect that there will be little pressure on policy makers to improve maternity pay and leave until there is. This despite the struggle emotional and financial of young mothers who have to go back to work all too soon.
The Vol Abroad 