Paid Time Off MattersA (slow) progress report

Soon a new team promoting paid leave in the private sector?

Read the ad recently posted by Panorama Global (headed by Gabrielle Fitzgerald) about its new project: Panorama has received funding from a prominent U.S. philanthropist to better understand the private sector and how they make decisions regarding paid leave. Based on our findings, we will test different approaches to influencing those companies and see if we can find the right mix of strategy and tactics to move the needle on paid leave programs in the U.S. Our goal by the end of this project is to have a much deeper understanding of the landscape, and determine a recommended path forward to drive adoption of paid leave programs in the private sector. A concern shared by the recent research published by the Center for American Progress. Who is the mysterious and still anonymous 'prominent US philanthropist" supporting this initiative? Could she be Melinda Gates? She expressed several times her concern about paid family leave.

Ikea and Trump on paid leave

Here is an interesting post from the pro-employer blog The Employerologist by Janette Levey Frisch . Here is how she explains the core of the matter:

Currently, IKEA employees receive up to 5 days’ paid parental leave, and up to 8 weeks’ paid disability leave to new mothers. Effective January 1, 2016, under IKEA’s new policy, new parents who have worked at IKEA for at least one year can receive up to four months’ paid leave. This new policy applies to both mothers and fathers, whether they are birth, adoptive or foster parents. For the first six weeks they will receive their full base pay, and half their base pay for the next six weeks. Workers with 3 or more years of service will be eligible for 8 weeks of full pay and 8 weeks of half pay. By U.S. standards this is a very generous policy. Compared to IKEA’s home country however, this is quite stingy. In Sweden, workers can receive up to 68 weeks off and the government subsidizes it. Other countries also provide more generous, paid time off. Is that why IKEA made this move? Not really.

IKEA says it expects that this expansion of paid leave will improve productivity and reduce turnover. IKEA is not alone. Other US companies, such as Netflix, Adobe and Etsy have also rolled out comparatively generous paid leave, though their programs tend to apply only to either top-tiered or salaried employees, whereas IKEA’s benefits apply to both hourly and salaried workers.

Let me repeat our mantra: when is Microsoft going to emulate IKEA and improve upon its minimal paid leave standards for all its suppliers employees? When googling about this info, I find references to articles in USA Today, The Atlantic, Forbes, but no Washington State publication. if I did not subscribe to this specialized blog I would not know about this. My mistake as there was a reprint of an AP wire in the Seattle Times. 

2016 Expedia Vacation Deprivation Survey: Strange and Misleading

The presentation of the 2016 Expedia deprivation Survey is here. The headline is: Work-Life Imbalance: Expedia’s 2016 Vacation Deprivation Study Shows Americans Leave Hundreds of Millions of Paid Vacation Days Unused. The study claims:  Americans received 15 paid vacation days from their employers in the past year, and took only 12. With three days unused, this means American workers effectively failed to take approximately 375 million paid vacation days within the past year. What about the millions of american workers who don't receive any paid vacation? They don't seem to appear in the survey. They certainly would like to take vacation if they could afford it but they seem invisible to Expedia. Reading the survey's analysis one has the impression many Americans choose to take less paid vacation than they have. How misleading is that when so many don't have any paid vacation at all! Though many American companies indeed 'gift' their workers between five and 15 salaried days off per year, the most recent study (2014) from the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research found that nearly one in four private-sector workers doesn’t receive any paid vacation time.  That's what has to change and it is somewhat intriguing, even shocking that Expedia does not point this out. Why? obviously if millions of workers were getting paid vacation that would be good for Expedia's business?

Zero weeks. Zero request

Yesterday was Microsoft's annual meeting. No question was asked about the implementation of the 'at least 15 days of paid time off' requirement nor about the lack of specific paid maternity/paternity leave or the lack of paid company holidays (like Thanksgiving we just celebrated). We were unable to find Microsoft's shareholders willing to even ask such questions. Zero weeks is a documentary film about this issue. Here is the trailer. While it's important to push for legislation and a funding system that would cover every employee, it should be clear that many very wealthy corporations (like Microsoft) could easily afford to pay right away for paid family leaves. Why don't they? Because nobody asks them to! How long will it take for someone to speak up?