California’s Paid Family Leave (PFL) program, a breakthrough initiative that has inspired a handful of similar legislation efforts nationwide, is designed to give workers access to paid leave to care for family members. PFL provides employees with up to six weeks’ wage replacement when they leave work for the birth or adoption of a child, or to care for a seriously ill family member. After widespread fear that the program would hurt the state’s business competitiveness, investigators at the Center for Economic Policy Research checked in with 253 California companies about how they’ve fared in the five years since the policy became widely available to workers. 

Researchers discovered that the vast majority of employers — more than 90 percent — say that PFL has had a positive effect or no effect on profitability, performance, turnover and employee morale. They also discovered that about 60 percent of employers report cost-savings because employees used PFL instead of, or in combination with, employer-provided benefits.

“In virtually all of the establishments we visited, managers had crafted solutions of one sort or another to the problem of covering the work of absent employees,” authors Eileen Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman write. “Most were able to do so with little difficulty, although sometimes the costs in premium overtime pay or fees to temp agencies are significant.”

Eileen Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman, Leaves that Pay, Center for Economic and Policy Research

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/leaves-that-pay

This article was featured in the October 2011 issue of Working Mother Research Institute’s email newsletter, Working Mother Research Institute Essentials. To read additional stories from that issue, see the related content section above. To subscribe to Working Mother Research Institute Essentials, register on the newsletter page of this website.