Families and lets finally give americans access to paid leave. I urge my colleagues to join me in this fight and pass the family act. I now would like to yield the floor to my colleague who is also going to speak about why this is good for america. Ms. Duckworth mr. President. The presiding officer the senator from illinois. Ms. Duckworth thank you, mr. President. I want to thank my colleague from new york on the floor today for her leadership in this very important issue. Im here to help discuss one of the most pressing issues facing American Families all across the country, our nations outdated family leave policies. About two weeks ago i announced i am expecting a baby girl in april. The support since my announcement has been overwhelming. I received so many congratulations and lots of questions about my daughter to be. And i was also asked how i expect to handle having a newborn and 3yearold as i continue my work here in the United States senate. I know these questions come from a good place, but lets be real, its 2018. Women have been having children since the beginning of humanity and im not the first person to be a working mom. My colleague was a working legislator before i was. Many moms have been balancing the demands of jobs and families since the female trailblazers. The United States is one of just a handful of developed countries in the world that doesnt offer paid maternity leave, and one of the very few industrialized nations that doesnt offer pay parental or family leave to parents. Across our nation working families face barriers to staying in the workforce, lack of access to affordable child care and paid medical leave, forces families to leave between taking care of their children or a sick Family Member and losing their job or Health Insurance. That hurts our entire country. Thats why as we mark the 25th anniversary of the family and medical leave act today, i want to highlight some of the commonsense legislation my colleagues and i have introduced to make the workplace more accommodating for working parents. Senator gillibrand has a great bill, the family act, that would do just that, that would have a medical and Family Leave Insurance Program that would cost less than 1. 50 per week on average. This is people helping themselves so they can have the leave that they need when their families need it. Senator Patty Murrays child care for working families act would ensure that every family has access to affordable child care. And my act would mean the parents in schools reauthorization act would increase access to oncampus care for student parents who make up onequarter of all College Students in america. These bills are a great place to start and we should take them up in the senate as soon as possible. After all the fmla passed in 1993. While it was an important step forward for our country, it is not comprehensive and it is nowhere near enough. Many workers across the country are ineligible for it and dont qualify to receive unpaid time off and cant afford it. The fmla does little to help americans who cant afford those who cant take time off. We need to do what we can to change that. To offer paid parental leave like the rest of the world has. Theres no reason we cant get this done today, and we should get to work on it today. Thank you. The presiding officer the senator from north dakota. Ms. Heitkamp mr. President , i rise today to talk about paid family leave. I want to kind of introduce this topic by saying, you know, politicians across america, whether they are local, whether they are in state offices, or whether they are in very important bodies like the United States senate, make one pledge, and that is to support American Families, to make life just a little easier for the people who are raising the next generation, to do what it takes to encourage people to have families and to have children so our future is secured with a workforce and also the vibrancy that is america. So it is 25 years since we adopted the family medical leave act. That was a great step forward and actually i actually remember when it happened. I was north dakotas attorney general cheering from the sidelines thinking, we involved this problem, we are protecting parents from losing their jobs and able to care for their newborns. Unfortunately, it wasnt enough. It wasnt enough because how many people, even if they have the protection can afford to exercise their right under family medical leave act . Very, very few in my state. And so it is absolutely essential that we take this to the next step, that we make sure that we are not forcing our citizens to choose between working as they have to when families live paycheck to paycheck and caring for their newborn. Yet, many day care facilities wont even take a baby. Think about that, wont take an infant until they are 10 or 12 weeks old. What choice have we given families under the family medical leave act. Just 40 have access to paid family leave through their employer. That leaves millions of people without access to paid leave, time away from their job to care for a new child or a seriously sick relative. It is well past the time that the United States of america, the dplaitest greatest country in the world, has a federal medical paid leave policy. I will tell you, i find this issue particularly vexing because as north dakota competes with the rest of the country for workforce, if you go to california this benefit is extended through a state system, if you go to rhode island, this benefit is extended through a state system. New york is pursuing a system. Large populations have the economies to scale to offer this benefit. Guess what happens to a state that only has 700,000 people in population, think about the percentages that we would need to run a statebased program. We need a National Solution to this problem. I know a lot of people are talking about, the states are doing it, the laboratories of experimentation in this great democracy. But for states that dont enjoy the economy of scale, this wont be a reality in my state who want to have children. Day care is the second issue that makes this so, so difficult. We need to make sure that people know that they are going to have a guaranteed income for those first three months of child raising. And why is that important . It is also important because we know, as a matter of physiological development, that bonding period of time with your parents, those early months are so critical. And when people get detatched from their parents during the early months, you can suffer psychological effects that will last forever, and so we need to get this done. So lets talk about what the proposals are on the table, and i dont want to be critical because i think it is wonderful that this issue has come to this body, not only on this side of the aisle, but to talk about the need for paid family leave. But once again, where we applauded the family medical leave act, we left too many people behind. We cant do that again. We cant do that again, and so thats why its really important that we analyze the proposals that are out there. And so i know that, along with my good friend, the senator from new york, we have been having long and extensive conversations with many republicans about this issue, many folks in the white house about the need for paid federal paid leave, but in the past few days details have come out about a republican plan that would have new parents do something we should never do, which is take money out of our retirement system. So have new parents take money out of their Social Security benefits. Think about that. We have a Retirement Crisis in this country. Too few people have anything other than Social Security to live on in their older years and now were saying, guess what, borrow against that. Get your Social Security to help you pay for what happens today and then hope upon hope that you will have enough money to retire in the future. It is, quite honestly, the wrong direction. And so this plan does not, in my opinion, support families. It would not help most working families and those who could use it. It would force them to choose between caring for a newborn or a Family Member or their retirement savings. I think it is likely that people would take that option, but jeopardizing their future retirement is not a choice they should have to make. Women already get think about this get on average 20 less in Social Security benefits than men. Why is that . It is that way because of the pay gap that we have in this country. Social security is a critical Retirement Security plan in this country, and for far too many families it is the only thing they can rely on in retirement, something we need to fix and we need to exacerbate it by complicating the Social SecurityRetirement Crisis with the problem of paid family leave. So i am here to advocate for a bill that senator gillibrand has introduced, and i have cosponsored, called the family act. It is a real federal paid leave policy that i think we desperately need. We need to support working families in this bill because this would truly make that promise of family paid leave possible. So our bill provides 12 weeks of partially paid leave for workers dealing with Serious Health issues on their own, including birth and adoption of children or for Family Members. Our bill would create an affordable effective earned benefit that both employers and employees could contribute to and would contribute to. For employees, the paid leave benefit would always apply to them no matter where they live. It is transportable, which is so important in this new gig economy. Almost half of north dakota workers do not qualify i want you to remember this for a single work day where they could get sick and only about onethird of north dakotas workers are eligible for and can afford unpaid leave. For them the family act would make all the difference. No family should have to koo choose between a loved one to choose wean a loved one between a loved one and their job. They should not have to do that today because they cant afford it when they put ink pen to paper. So our bill also levels the Playing Field for businesses. I think this is an important part. I want people to understand this. If youre a small firm in north dakota that does coding. Lets say that youre a Software Firm and you want you get an exciting new product. You want to generate excitement within your business and you want to recruit the best and the brightest coming out of our universities, coming out of our technical schools, but youre competing against microsoft and youre competing against google and your competing against all of those companies that can afford to provide that benefit. Many, many of the Small Businesses in my state have said, help us compete. Help us compete for the best and brightest. Because when those benefits are offered to workers, where are they going to go when they want to raise a family in they are going to family . They are going to go where not just the pay is better but where they can get the benefit of paid family leave. It is critically important that Small Businesses enjoy the economies of scale. Many if you work in retail and you say i want to exercise my right of family leave and im going to go, i mean, youre going to protect the job, but you cant afford to pay that person when youre paying another person in a Small Business. That struggle if you can think about this the way that i think about it, which is we have Unemployment Insurance for a reason. We have Unemployment Insurance because temporarily people have to get out of the workforce because maybe their job no longer exists or they have had a crisis in their family not a crisis in their family, but they lost their job for some reason. We give Unemployment Benefits to help bridge theming to the next them to the next job, to keep them in the workforce, and as a condition of that, we can them ask them to continue to look for a job and we hopefully provide some services in their search for a job. You think about the unemployment system. Who here would repeal Unemployment Insurance . Its temporary. This is an extension, and think about it like you would think about Unemployment Insurance. Something happens in your family. You have a baby. Your mother gets cancer. Your husband gets cancer. You cant afford to take that time off, but you cant afford to leave them alone. And so what do you do . You exit the workforce, potentially qualifying for food stamps, potentially qualifying for government benefits. This benefit keeps people in the workforce. And when i talked about this benefit in dickinson, north dakota, not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, and i explained why i thought it was important that we do it, a woman came up to me afterwards and said you know what i really like about your plan, senator heitkamp . I said that were going to help families. She said well, thats important, but she said i really like that it keeps people in the workforce. That they come to it, they have a job when they come back, and theyre able to bridge that and not leave employment. Think about this. Think about the economic disruption that happens when somebody cant keep an employee. Because of these challenges. Retraining costs are high. Thats why when this started in california, this was not this was yet again another, you know, Big Government program. People would talk about it that way. Satisfaction levels with this program from every end of the spectrum in california are off the charts, with employers and employees, with Small Business, with large business, because they know that that retraining and retooling that they would have to do for employees is is expensive, and they want to keep those good employees that they have. Lets do something for families. Lets actually do something. Lets not just promise it. Lets not mortgage our retirement for it. Lets do something for families and actually take this burden and say were going to help you if you want to have a child, three months of paid family leave. Not at your total salary. It wont be the full amount, but were going to help you if your mom gets sick with cancer so you dont have to leave your job to take care of her. Were going to work with families to make this happen. I can guarantee you this will be a program that will be remembered the way we remember other great programs like Social Security, other great programs like medicare, other great programs like Unemployment Insurance. And so with that, i just urge my colleagues to take a look at the family act, take a look at all the good economic arguments that go with it. Not the heartwarming arguments which i think we can make but the economic arguments about why this makes sense for American Business and why this makes sense for the American Economy. With that, mr. President , i yield the floor. I notice the absence of a quorum. The presiding officer the clerk will call the roll. Quorum call mr. Blunt mr. President. The presiding officer the senator from missouri. Mr. Blunt i move we suspend the quorum call. The presiding officer without objection. Mr. Blunt mr. President , when the jobs act and tax cut bill was signed into law in december, we heard a lot of things about what was going to immediately happen. This was going to be a tax cut for the rich. Corporations were going to use their money to buy back their stock and not share it with the people that worked for them. The senate, as divided on a partisan basis as the senate could be. Every person in the majority who was here voted for the tax bill. Every person in the minority voted against the tax bill. We heard from some of the leaders of the other side that it would be armageddon. We heard from president obamas treasury secretary that 10,000 people would die every year if the tax bill was signed into law. We heard that the average family would only get crumbs and scraps from the tax bill. Its turning out that thats not what appears to be happening at all. Not only have companies stepped up to show that in a growing economy, an economy they believe is going to grow, that they value the people they work with and they value the employees of their company in a way that we wouldnt have anticipated. I thought this would happen as we saw the economy take off from the tax bill. It didnt occur to most of us that companies would step up on day one and say were going to value and show our value to the people that work for us. Over i think 3. 8 Million People now have received over 4 billion in bonuses. A lot of those happened in my state. A lot of those things happened in missouri. The central bank of st. Louis, which has over 2,000 people, gave a 1,000 bonus to all their fulltime employees. The 246 parttime employees they had will get a 500 bonus. Charter communications gave a an announcement, as many people have, that theyre going to increase their own minimum. Whatever their minimum salaries had been in the past, those are going to be higher now. You know, the very best kind of minimum wage increase is when youre increasing your minimum wage because you believe thats the fair thing to do for your employees and also because you believe its what you need to do to keep good employees in a rising economy, and so we have seen that. I think, mr. President , we have gotten so used to the stagnant economy of the last eight or so years that people have forget what happens when the economy begins to grow, so Charter Communications now increasing their minimum wage to 15