Library. Washington journal continues. Host for tuesday round table on family leavepaid were joined by Aparna Mathur resident scholar at the American Enterprise institute. Atbel sawhill senior nell the brookings institute. Paid familyookings leave project. Good morning to you both. Here. You for being Isabel Sawhill the working group that youre part of, out with a report last week getting attention from the highest levels of the white house. Paid family and medical leave an issue whos time has come. Whos timen issue has come . Isabel i think its an issue that time has come, were the advanced country and one of the very few countries in the world that had a paid family leave program. For new parents. We thought its really time for the United States to step up and for parents who that are balancing work and family life. You have a baby and especially low wage worker, youre very dependent on your wages. Suddenly, you either have to be at work or you have to be home baby. Care of the you cant do both. Host what is this working group and how put together . Aparna thats a great question. We wanted to get experts whos this issue for years. A group. Gether from American Action forum. We have experts at universities. We think it represents people who have traditionally views. Ative people who have liberal views. Republican administrations and hill on democratic issues. Just to make sure that we were representing all sides clearly and carefully. We were engaging in the debate looking at things from everybodys point of view. Businesses think about this. How do workers feel about this. Group. En a fun working host and the report issued last week getting attention from the as well. Se its a working group that didnt agree on everything. At least came up with a proposal on paid family leave. Are you proposing. Isabel there are three types leave. Family theres leave to take care of a new baby. Theres leave for your own problems. Theres leave to take care of member. Sick family what we focused is the new baby piece of this. Came up with a compromised proposal. Aparna said, it was difficult to do. We managed and got everybody on same page. We said people should get eight paid leave, 70 of your regular wage or salary up to a of 600 per week. We said you should have job protection, meaning if you take leave and you come back to the same employer, they should save your job for you. Would apply for both paternityleave and leave . How would this be paid for . Aparna the compromise we calm up with was to have a payroll hike to fund part of the paid leave program. But at the same time, that theng the concern u. S. Government deficits and debts are unsustainable trajectory. We put in a caveat in there being we want the policy to budget neutral. We want to do this in combination with spending cuts budget. E in the specifically cuts that dont workers. Income neutral. His budget which is how states are doing it currently. Host its the idea to get this legislation . Ederal isabel that would be many aspiration. There are five who have it. It. S it is really an issue this time as come. If the federal government doesnt do it, we think the will continue to march forward on their own. Areof private employers beginning to catch on. Host this report available both and aeis web pages. It was getting promoted being last week by ivanka trump herself. Tweeting out the date of the release of the report. Time to make America Great for working families. The president s daughter said. You had a chance to meet with her. Had a really good meeting with ivanka trump herself and her team. We have sent them copies of the report. They read it and their reactions was wonderful. What was interesting to me, it signaled openness to this report. Saying, were not stuck with the plan that we proposed during the campaign. To understood it through state Unemployment Insurance. To offer a Relief Program for settlement weeks. We showed them our compromised plan, they said, open to newtely approaches. We love the issue. About. What were care more actione to see on the report that you guys presented to us. Host this compromised plan that able to come up with, just one of several plans out there. Theres president s plan he talked about on the campaign trail. Theres couple floating around from members of congress. Isabel theres a democratic provides 12 weeks of paid leave. Camemore generous what we up with. Its gotten quite a lot of attention. By senator gillibrand and derosa. Woman some other plan. On the republican side, a plan been put forward by senator fisher and senator rubio providesor king that tax incentives to private employers to do more on the paid front. Host were talking about all of these plans this morning. Especially this proposal from brookings institute. Hear your story about family leave. Especially parental leave. Your officening in and your questions as we take up this topic. Here onnext 40 minutes washington journal. Phone lines, republicans 2027488001 and democrats 2027488000, independents 2027488002. Marlin is in coffman, texas, a republican. Good morning. Caller good morning. I was just wondering how you position that you should get families should at paid leave when they have baby. Or some other series illness. Women same time they want to have equal pay with men if they dont do equal work. Noticed from the brookings institute, theyre always willing to spend other programs. Ey on their thats the way of the liberals. They love spending other people money. Thank you. Isabel i like to answer that. For your comment. First of all, let me point out that the way we propose paying is through a payroll tax on employees. Not other people money. Its the money of the people who are actually going to get their benefits. Its similar to Social Security, you pay into the system and you get benefits. Is the same idea. You pay into the system through an employee payroll tax and then you get the benefits later on. Who hase that somebody children is going to benefit compared to someone who never has children. Still its a contributory system. Host Aparna Mathur i want you idea that wase important in your report to say, it would be the same benefits paternity leave as Maternity Leave. Aparna just to answer the question before. Care about these policies because they do encourage women to stay in the labor force. A baby, we often find them just quitting the workforce. Deciding it was too much to manage work and family. Who areion that women taking time off or actually passing on the work responsibility to somebody else, its unfair. About a minimum period of leave. People can need it at any point time. Thats how insurance works. Someone needs it, someone else steps in. Do get we do care about gender we dont want this to be a policy against women. Is your responsibility to go home and look after the child. You need to take time off from work. We found from a lot of research that its really important to have fathers take that time off. For bonding. T its important for gender neutrality in child care. We think it reduces the potential for discrimination if were telling employers that both mothers and that eligible for the leave. Host lot of great charts in your report. Them comparing in 1965. Nd mothers the yellow is the number of hours a week spent in paid work. Part of the bar, the week fathersrs spend. House work. Orange part number of hours a week spent in child care. Fast forward to 2015, the change in those hours among fathers here on the left and mothers out right. Yellow paid work and blue house work and orange child care. Reportwant to see the its available both on Brookings Institution and aeis website. It thising through morning. Joe ann is in birmingham, alabama. I dont recall caller i was saying how important it is for paid leave. Foure taken care of about or five what . Four or five caller foryour five of my elder members off work to take care of them. Them. Id for some kind of way. I dont know through Social Security or whatever. Too, i think we inuld invest a lot of time women being trained to be healthcare workers for the care. Y and child lot of young women are good with children but theyre not teacher orbeing a doctor. They might be interested in taking care of our children. Themt a program to support and their training and invest a ablef money in them being to work as they wont have to hire a babysitter. Sometimes you got three or four children, you want to go to for, youre really wagger working for the babysitter. Point i think that the she made about lot of elderly people need care is exactly right. How expensive it is if there arent family members available, to take care of an elderly relative and they end up medicaid and in a nursing home. Thats much more expensive than if you can free up family members to help with the care. Its also better care typically. Training, i about couldnt grow more. Healthre tons of jobs as aids in the healthcare system. We do need to train more people that. Host your work group is goal to another compromised proposal on family leave for sick care. Caller about whether i have children or not. If you are spending my time, i have a right to tell you. Is not addressed because it is considered political suicide. Host what kind of business did you and your husband run . Caller we had a small honda ,ealership in Saint Augustine florida. Financially that we could have. Host got your point on that and thanks for the call. Guest thank you for those thoughts. Of all, on the impact on Small Businesses like yours, very important. We talked about it a lot. The public think about paid leave, they think its going to be a mandate on employers to pay for it. That is not what we propose. We propose it be paid for through payroll taxes. The point on how it could be disrupted even though someone else is paying for it to have to replace them until they came back is absolutely right. We did have some conversation about whether or not we should accept exempt Small Businesses. Host juju in the end did you in the end . Guest for maybe the smallest businesses with businesses fewer think thatloyees, i exemption could be considered. It is still part of the design. Guest i wanted to Say Something about her second point. I read a whole book on your second issue and i want to tell you about my book called generation unbound. It addresses right on the mail exactly what you are talking about. Host the conclusion that you would give to her . Guest my conclusion would be that we need to help young women of lloyd these unplanned avoid these unplanned pregnancies and burst that they s thatt press birth they are not prepared to hav e. Host good morning, johnny. Caller i have a comment and a question. A latenight talkshow host just had a baby and a life and the child had a heart defect. Should bes parents given automatic paid leave for that situation. Can you please find how the Affordable Care act the fines existing conditions versus the republican plan and how they define existing conditions . Host a bit of a different topic. Guest i do not know the details of the definition of preexisting conditions and the aca versus the republican bill. We have two republican bills. We have the house bill and now the Senate Working on it. Everything is a little up in the air. Host lets start on the front side of the question. It uses the example of jimmy kimmel situation. Can you talk about companies and types of businesses and what sectors generally offer paid leave policies right now . It is not a federal mandate, but the individual businesses are doing it. Who is more likely to get a paid leave policy today . Guest when you look at the landscape of which Companies Give paid leave policies, tends to be larger businesses, companies and tech and finance. Are typically recruiting high skilled workers and want to retain those workers. They think there is a benefit to offering a competitive package that includes these policies. The workers with the least access are those in retail and food and services and sort of leisure, hospitality, those kinds of industries. Workers tend to be low paid and have low benefits. Even imagine dont that they have access to these kinds of policies. See these disparities. Youou are high wage worker, are more likely to get it and if you are a lowwage worker, you are least likely to get it. Andnly have 14 of workers that even have access to paid leave. We are not just talking about lowwage workers even though disparities are pretty obvious there. It still a lot of middle income and high income workers that do not have access to these policies. Host thomas is a republican. Good morning. Caller how are you . Two simple questions to the guests i heard one of them say that 600 a week should go to these women. My next question is to each support planned parenthood . I would like to have an answer please. Host do you want to clarify the policy . Guest the policy is that you , but0 of your normal wage only up to 600 per week. Year, make 100,000 a youre still only going to get the 600. Its an attempt to make sure the benefits go to people toward the lower end of the wage scale. Access tort contraception for women. , butnk its very important it dont tickets related to this issue all that much. Host that was not a policy recommendation included . We did not talk about that at all on our group. Host is it in the process of being turned into official legislation . Guest not at all. Were at the stage where were trying to get our report out to everybody. It offers a framework for thinking about these issues. The white house is showing a lot of interest in our report and they are interested in continuing that conversation. We are hoping that this is the base for starting that conversation. I do not think we are close to legislation yet. Emphasize we need to other types of leave. So many colors have suggested that there are people struggling to look after their elderly parents. There are people struggling to look after their children. We need to have policy surrounding that as well. This is a report thats going to candy. It is the aei Brookings Working Group on paid family leave. Very easy to find on the internet. Dorothy is in abilene, texas. Good morning. Go ahead. Caller good morning. My name is dorothy. Host you are on the air. Caller i was calling because this president wants to take our Social Security. He wants to take our medicare he wants to cut all the benefits that would help people thats working. He is not helping working families. Host i will let you take that up and maybe can talk us through what the president s proposal was on the campaign trail for the paid family leave and where that is in the process. Guest their proposal was to provide paid parental leave the state Unemployment Insurance programs and provide about six weeks of paid leave these are state programs, the benefits would very across states. I think what were seeing now is more flexibility and the idea that this is not a plan that they actually intend to promote. This may not be the legislation they intend to back. Theyre open to new ways of doing. , we specifically outlined that we do not want this to come at the cost of that to lower income workers. I know that theres a big aday mdc that any new spending might come at the cost of low income workers or elderly people. In our very clear working group that this is a tradeoff we were willing to make. Host the district of columbia is one of the parts of the country that has their own specific program that has now been passed into law. What is d. C. s benefit when it comes to paternity leave and Maternity Leave . Plan the d. C. Paid leave is one of the most generous we have seen. Of theare a resident district of columbia, you should be happy about that. I do think its going to be more expensive than they may think. We will see how that works out. We are having are quite a lot of experience now because we have different states doing this in different ways. We have an opportunity now to see what kind of paid leave plan works the best. Host the oldest program from the state is in california, enacted in 2002. What can we learn from their plan . Guest the california plan is a very sensible plan, i think. What we have learned from it is first of all not that many people know about it. The number of people who have actually participated have not been very high. We also know that contrary to what many people assume, businesses have been quite happy with it. ,here have been surveys including smaller businesses, and they have had no problem with it at all. Host other states with programs are new jersey, rhode island, and new york. We went through the district of columbia as well. Robin is waiting in durham, north carolina. Good morning. Caller good morning. I want to express im not for because number one, i dont want anything else deducted from my check as a tax. When i was having my family, i knew that i needed to save at least six months of hills and stuff. I was carefully planning my parenthood. People should do that. I believe that the federal government and the state would put more emphasis on quality day incorporate newborn training for employees or caregivers, maybe after eight weeks after birth i went back to work. If a woman has to go back to work with other circumstances, the care should be at an affordable rate. I do not believe that i should for somee paying a tax other womans decision to have a child if she is not financially prepared for it. I know that might sound selfish, but thats enough taxes. There are enough things that we are carrying. We are doing food stamps. We are doing section eight financing. We are doing all these things. Theres a limit to what taxes can pay for. Host thanks for sharing your story. Guest thats a great point and we do here that from people saying we do not want any more taxes on our waste income. Wage income. There are proposals on how we can incentivize people to save andor becoming parents maybe thats a policy that is sort of more neutral and allows people the choice to do it. Policy,mending that there are a lot of low income people who simply dont have the resources to save. We are talking about social insurance. That does mean that other people are helping them meet that need. As a society, im sure more people are comfortable with of not caringtead about other workers. The other thing to point out is that suggests we need to move beyond parental leave. We need to talk about leave for own illness. We need to talk about leave for looking after elder