Argumentative Essay On Maternity Leave

Imagine you were pregnant, When you gave birth to your child, the only maternity leave you received was a month’s worth of vacation and sick time. And when you went to return to work, you found your job no longer existed. Since your employer was a small company, it didn’t have to go by federal laws that require 12 weeks of job protection after birth. This story is fictional, but it is real for so many. In America, there is no federal mandated paid maternity leave and that is hurting our women and our children by causing the miracle of birth to be masked by the all too real cost of no paid maternity leave.
America is the one and only developed country that does not offer any paid maternity leave. Maternity leave is a period of absence from work granted to a mother before and after the birth of her child. In America this means twelve weeks of unpaid absence that guarantees her job when she returns. We are so far behind everyone that out of all of the countries around the world seven out of 196 including America do not have mandatory paid maternity leave. (Colorado public radio news) That is a sad figure, to think that we place having a family so high but don’t give the mothers the protection and security they deserve.

Of course, there are twelve weeks of unpaid leave that ensures you will have a job when you get back, but there are restrictions on it making 40% of women not even qualify for the twelve weeks. FMLA restrictions release a business from the obligation of allowing unpaid time off. These exceptions include the size of the company less than 50 employees, the time of employment less than 12 months, and level of wages top 10%. ( United States Department of Labor) Employees with incomes that account for the top 10% of wages for the business may not be eligible for unpaid benefit if the company can show evidence that your absence creates significant financial harm to the organization.(American pregnancy association)
“Maternity leave in America essentially means that women and men and families are very much on their own,” says Vicki Shabo, vice president at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “Too many workers lack any form of leave, whether job-protected or job-protected and paid, and too many families are forced to make really terrible choices between paying the bills and taking care of their child.” (Shabo, VP, National Partnership for women and families)
According to an analysis by Abt Associates of a 2012 survey it conducted for the Department of Labor, only one in four women who took leave to care for a new baby took only two weeks or fewer off. A survey of women who gave birth in 2005 found that they took an average of 10 weeks total maternity leave, with 12% taking four weeks or fewer and only 40 percent received any kind of pay. But in a recent investigative piece at In These Times, journalist Sharon Lerner suggests that the post-recession picture may be even worse. According to an analysis by Abt Associates of a 2012 survey it conducted for the Department of Labor, nearly one in four women who took leave to care for a new baby took only two weeks or fewer off. About half of those women were back to work in under a week. ( Lerner, Department of labor, women's rights)
Of course, even if they do have access to unpaid leave, few low-wage workers can afford to voluntarily forgo a paycheck for a month or two to actually utilize it. In the survey mentioned above of women who had a baby in 2005, more than half of the respondents reported that they didn’t stay home as long as they would have liked and, of those women, more than 80 percent said they lacked the financial resources to do so. Indeed, research suggests that FMLA increases leave-taking only among the economically advantaged. Still, the law at least guarantees that workers have a job to return to in those cases when taking time off is not a matter of choice—and FMLA’s exemptions mean many poor women are without this basic legal protection.
It’s a reality that can be sometimes overshadowed when the conversation around maternity leave focuses on how much worse off all American women are compared to their counterparts in, well, nearly every other country in the world: The impact of our terrible federal family leave mandate does not fall evenly. And as elite employers—like Microsoft, Netflix, and Adobe, to name the latest—are increasingly competing for talent by announcing generous paid family leave policies, the disparity is destined to grow. Netflix’s new much-criticized two-tier parental leave policy—12 months for well-compensated, salaried employees on the digital side but just 12 weeks for the lower-paid, hourly workers shipping DVDs—reflects the reality in the U.S. economy writ large: We may be a nation of paupers when it comes to support for working parents, but there are still haves and have-nots.
That’s because, in an all-too-familiar dynamic in which the rich get richer, low-income workers are both less likely to receive paid leave and less able to make do without it. The dismal stat that only 13 percent of all U.S. workers have access to any form of paid family leave looks even worse when you consider it’s something heavily concentrated among the wealthy: More than 20 percent of the top quartile earners enjoy it, while only five percent in the bottom quartile do. Furthermore, low-income workers are also less likely to have other forms of paid leave—like sick days and vacation time—that they can save up and piece together to create their own de facto paid leave after the arrival of a child. While the vast majority of workers in the top quartile have such benefits, only about a third of those in the bottom quartile have access to sick days and only half get vacation time.
Low-wage workers are even disproportionately excluded from unpaid family leave.

While the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act theoretically guarantees all workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a new child or sick family member, it applies only to businesses with more than 50 employees, only covers workers that have been with their employer for at least one year, and doesn’t extend to part-time workers. These exemptions are significant; they ensure that just over half of American workers and less than a fifth of all new mothers are actually covered by FMLA. And they disproportionately affect low-income workers, who are more likely to work for small businesses, change employers frequently, and piece together multiple part-time

jobs.
So how exactly do low-income women manage to hold down a job while recovering from childbirth and/or caring for a new child? Well, many of them don’t. For all the media attention paid to a supposed trend of wealthy, highly educated women “opting out” of the workforce when they have a kid, the reality is exactly the opposite: Many low-income mothers are the ones forced out. According to the latest Census analysis of maternity leave and employment patterns between 2006 and 2008, nearly half of women with less than a high school education quit their jobs upon the birth of their first child; for women with a bachelor's degree or higher, that figure is under 13 percent. Less educated women were also four times more likely—10.9 percent compared to 2.7—to be let go by their employers when they had a baby.
Such job interruptions can have a long-term impact on earnings. Indeed, the fact that women are more likely than men to take time off, reduce their work hours, opt for positions with more flexible schedules, or quit work altogether to care for a child or another family member is a major contributor to the overall gender pay gap. Of course, lack of maternity leave isn’t the only factor making it difficult for low-wage workers to juggle child-rearing and a job. The lack of subsidized child care is another; it may simply not make economic sense to go back to work if you’re a minimum wage earner in one of the 28 states in which the cost of child care for two kids exceeds your annual earnings.
Even for those mothers who manage to hang onto their jobs, taking unpaid time off requires financial sacrifices—ones that are all the riskier for low-wage workers already struggling to make ends meet. “A third of them have to borrow money to get by. A third have to dip into their savings. A third put off paying bills. Many may be doing all three to get through those early weeks,” Bryce Covert explains in a recent Elle article. “Fifteen percent of those who don't get full pay when they take leave have to go on public assistance to get by. Perhaps it's little wonder thata quarter of 'poverty spells'—an episode of poverty that lasts two months or more at a time—begin with the birth of a child.” (COVERT, Motherhood will cost you)
Meanwhile, the women who rush back to work often pay with their own health—and that of their baby. Research has linked longer maternity leaves to a laundry list of improved health outcomes—from lower rates of maternal depression to higher rates of child immunizations and longer periods of breastfeeding. A 2011 analysis of data from 141 countries found that an increase of 10 weeks of paid maternity leave was associated with a 10-percent-lower neonatal and infant mortality rate. Given how few get time off, it’s not surprising that poor mothers in the U.S. have double the rates of post- partum depression, are half as likely to breastfeed for the recommended six months, and are more than twice as likely to see their babies die within the first year. (Haymann, The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances)