Maternity Leave Essay

Depending on where one lives in a country the privilege a person is granted varies depending where in that country they live, or the equality of that country. An example of this is the United States and Italy, and their policies on maternity and paternity leave. Within the United States and Italy the similarities and differences for maternity and paternity leave for women are astonishing.
In the United States there are thousand and thousands of women who work. Women in the workforce are vital to the nation's economic security. Since they are vital to the U.S economy the U.S does not want women to be out of work for prolonged periods of time. Although that is the case there are women who have to be out of work due to unexpected or even planned pregnancies. With these pregnancies come trials of how much time they will receive off from work because of their pregnancy. The U.S policies for maternity leave have expanded extremely in the last two decades, but new mothers still tend have shorter periods of job protected leave, and less access to paid leave than women in other advanced industrialized countries. In the U.S every state has maternity leave except for 12 of the 50 states. Those states are California, Connecticut, Main, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. The states listed above are only required to have at least some of their private sector employers offer maternity leave coverage prior to the passage the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) (Berger & Waldfogel, 2003). Even though the other 38 states offer maternity leave only nine percent of them offer paid leave, but the jobs that offer leave is only for protection of their job not guaranteed pay, for th...

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...o their gender, but they are also being discriminated aginst because of their racr. Although FMLA has helped with maternity leave for women, it does have its limitatuions. The limitations are the person filling for leave has to be a full time employe as well as worked for their present company for at least one full year in order to be considered for maternity leave. This leaves little to no leway for unplanned prenancies while working for a company in the U.S. Over 49% of new mothers in the United States still do not have access to any form of paid parental leave. The U.S. remains the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide a statutory right to paid maternity leave. In fact, even counting developing nations, the U.S. is among only a handful of other countries that do not guarantee paid maternity leave, such as Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.