Legislative lowdown: Biden proposes paid family and medical leave, again

President Biden laid out his administration’s legislative priorities in a budget proposal for fiscal year 2025, released on March 11. The proposal is unlikely to go anywhere in Congress, but it does tell us more about legislative priorities that will shape Biden’s reelection platform—and potentially, his second term in office. Among the items in the proposal employers should keep an eye on is the establishment of a national paid family and medical leave program, as well as granting sick days to US workers.

Under the proposed $325 billion leave program, which would be administered through the Social Security Administration, eligible workers would be able to take up to 12 weeks of paid leave for a number of reasons, including bonding with a new child, caring for an ill loved one, or healing from a serious illness. Workers would receive “progressive, partial wage replacement” during their time off, according to the proposal.

The president also called on Congress to pass legislation requiring employers to grant all workers seven days of job-protected sick leave.

President Biden proposed a similar program in his FY 24 budget.

The legislative landscape on leave. The US stands out as the only industrialized nation without a paid family and medical leave program. Lawmakers have been working to pass something that goes further than the Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave, for a decade or so, but thus far have been unsuccessful.

The Department of Labor (DOL) has suggested that a lack of national paid leave and other family policies stymies women’s participation in the US labor force. If women’s labor force participation was the same as in Germany or Canada, which both have national paid leave policies in place, there would be roughly 5 million more women in the labor force, according to a statistic cited by the DOL. “We know…the responsibility for things like childcare still falls disproportionately on women,” Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su told HR Brew when asked about paid family leave in March. “It’s very much a women’s equity issue.”

Late last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers announced a renewed effort to pass paid leave legislation, marking a rare effort by members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties. House representatives are reportedly looking into enacting some portions of a framework proposal that was shared in January, Politico reported in its Weekly Shift newsletter on March 25. They’re eyeing expanded tax credits for employers offering paid leave benefits, which could be enacted through a future tax package. “A pilot program that helps states implement their own policies might be enacted as part of future appropriations legislation,” the outlet added.

Ultimately, any federal paid-leave policy, regardless of what form it takes, will have a wide-reaching impact on businesses, “because you’re going to have to make sure that even if you do have some paid benefits, you know that it is compliant with what the federal law mandates,” Ashley Brightwell, a partner in the labor and employment practice of Atlanta-based law firm Alston + Bird, told HR Brew in January.