And for a tuesday round table on the topic of paid family leave, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution together, the joint directors of the joint ae brookings paid family leave project good morning to you both. Thank you for being here. Good morning. Isabelle sawhill, the working group, whose time has come. Why is it an issue whose time has come . I think its an issue whose time has come because were the only advanced country and, in fact, one of the very few countries in the entire world that doesnt have a paid Family Leave Program for new parents. So we thought its really time for the United States to step up and do something for parents who have jobs but are balancing work and family life and you have a baby and especially if youre a low wage worker, you have youre very dependent on your wages and suddenly you either have to be at work or you have to be home taking care of the baby and you cant do both. What is this working group and how is it put together . Whose on it . Thats a great question. So we wanted to represent all sorts of diverse views on toth topic. We wanted to get experts who have been working on this issue for years. We put together a group that consists of about 14 people. We have people from American Action forum, we have experts at universities. We think it represents people who have traditionally conservative views, people who have trauld liberal views, people who served in republican administrations or worked on the hill, on democratic issues, just to make sure that we were representing all five clearly careful we were engaging in the debate, looking at things from everybodys point of view, trying to represent how would businesses feel about this, how do workers feel about this. Its been a fun working group. I think were all happy with the outcome of the report. Getting attention from the white house as well. Its a working group that didnt agree on everything but at least came up with a proposal on paid family leave. So what are you proposing when it comes to paid family leave. There are three types of paid family leave. Theres leave to take care of a new baby, theres leave for your own medical problems and then theres leave to take care of another sick family member. What we focused on was the parental leave piece of this, the new baby piece of this. And we came up with a compromised proposal. It was difficult to do, but we managed and got everybody on the same page and basically we said people should get eight weeks of paid leave, 70 of your regular wage or salary, up to a cap of 600 per week and we said you should have job protection, meaning that if you take a leave and then you come back to the same employer, they should save their your job for you. And that would apply for both parental Maternity Leave and paternity leave. Exactly right. We will wanted to be equally available to moms and dads. And how would this be paid for under the proposal that you came up with . That was one of the most contentious issues we face. The compromise that we came up with was to have a payroll tax hike to fund part of the paid leave program but at the same time recognizing the concern that the u. S. Government deficits and debts are an unsustainable trajectory. We put a caveat in there saying we want the policy pob budget neutral. We want to do this with spending cuts specifically spending cuts that dont hurt low income workers. We dont want this to be a tradeoff, were giving you trade parental leave were taking away your medicaid benefits or something else. So we made this budget neutral. Were paying for it with a payroll tax. At the same time we want budget neutrality. Is the idea to get this turned into federal legislation . That would be many peoples aspiration but i should point out that a number of states already have paid leave programs. There are about five who either have it or about to have it. So it is really an issue whose time is come and if the federal government doesnt do it, we think the states will continue to march forward on their own. A lot of private employers are beginning to catch on to the need for this as well. This reports available both on brookings and aeis web pages for our viewers to look at for themselves. It was also getting promoted when it was being released last week by ivanka trump herself tweeting out the date of the release. Its you had a chance to meet with her or her staff . Thats right. What did she say about the report . We 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 this was wonderful. We love it. I think what was interesting to me was that this signaled an openness to this report is saying were not stuck with the plan that we proposed during the campaign. Their idea was to fund it through state Unemployment Insurance programs. To offer a plantal leave program for six weeks. When we showed them our compromised plan, they said, were absolutely open to new approaches. We love the issue. This is what were care about. Were not stuck with doing it the way we talked about it. So you know, we would love to see more action on the report that you guys have presented to us. This compromised plan that you were able to come up with, just one of several plans out there. Theres president s plan he talked about on the campaign trail. But theres also a couple floating around from members of congress. Walk us through those. Theres a democratic plan that provides 12 weeks of paid leave. Its more generous what we came up with. Its gotten quite a lot of attention. It was put out by senator gillibrand and congresswoman derosa delauro. Thank you very much. Theres also some other plans. On the republican side, a plan thats been put forward by senator fisher and senator rubio and senator king that provides tax incentives to private employers to do more on the paid leave front. Were talking about all of these plans this morning. Especially this proposal from the aei brookings institute. On paid family leave. We want to hear from you. We want to hear your story about family leave. Especially parental leave. Whats happening in your office your part of the country and your questions as we take up this topic for about the next 40 minutes here on the washington journal. Marlin is in coffman, texas, a republican. Good morning. Good morning. I was just wondering how you reconcile the position that you should get families should get paid leave when they have a baby. Or some other serious illness. At the same time they want women to have equal pay with men if they dont do equal work. If theyre off on their own. Another thing i noticed from the brookings institute, theyre always willing to spend other peoples money on their programs. Thats the way of the liberals. They love spending other people money. Thank you. Id like to answer that. Thank you for your comment. First of all, let me point out that the way we propose paying for this is through a payroll tax on employees. Its really not other peoples 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 later get benefits. This is the same idea. You pay into the system through an employee payroll tax and then you get some benefits later on. Its true that somebody who has children is going to benefit compared to someone who never has children. Still its a contributory system. I want you to focus on the idea that was important in your report to say, it would be the same benefits for paternity leave as Maternity Leave. Why was that important as you were going through the research here . Thats a great question and just to answer the question before. The reason we care about these policies because they do encourage women to stay in the labor force. When women have a baby, we often find them just quitting the workforce. Deciding its too much to try to manage work and family. This notion that women who are taking time off or actually going to passing on the work responsibility to somebody else, i think its unfair. We talking about a minimum period of leave. People can need it at any point in time. Thats how social insurance works. Someone needs it, someone else steps in. We do care about gender neutrality. Thats a critical part of the story. We dont want this to be a policy that this is against women that this is your responsibility p 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. Its important for bonding. Its important for gender neutrality in child care. We think it reduces the potential for discrimination against women if were telling employers that both mothers and fathers are equally eligible for the leave. Lot of great charts in your report. We love looking through those charts here. Heres one of them comparing fathers and mothers in 1965. The two bars on the left side here. The yellow is the number of hours a week spent in paid work. The blue part of the bar, the number of hours week fathers spent in house work. Orange part number of hours a week spent in child care. Compare that to mothers in 1965. Fast forward to 2015, the change in those hours among fathers here on the left and mothers out on the right. Yellow paid work and blue house work and orange child care. If you want to see the report its available both on Brookings Institution and aeis website. And were going through it this morning. Joe ann is in birmingham, alabama. Line for democrats. Good morning. I was saying how important it is for paid leave. Because a lot of time i know i have taken care of about four or five four or five what, joanne . Four or five of my elderly members so i have to take off work to take care of them. So i think it would be able to get paid of them some kind of way. I dont know through Social Security or whatever. Another thing too, i think we should invest a lot of time in young women being trained to be Health Care Workers for the elderly and for child care. Lot of young women are good with children but theyre not interested being a teacher or doctor. They might be interested in taking care of our children. We get a program to support them and their training and invest a lot of money in them being able to work as they wont have to hire a babysitter. Sometimes you got three or four children even though you want to go to work, youre really working for the babysitter. I think that the point she made about lot of elderly people need care is exactly right. Think about how expensive it is if there arent family members available to take care of lets say an elderly relative and they end up on 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. And on her point about training, i couldnt agree more. There are tons of jobs as health aides in the health care system. We do need to train more people for that. Your working group is your goal to come up with another compromise proposal on family leave for sick care . I know this focuses on parental care. Thats exactly right. Over the course of the next year we want to get into issues of family leave, medical leave. We dont have enough data. We dont understand completely, you know, what does that mean for the design of a policy . Are we talking about eight weeks, 12 weeks, four weeks when we allow people to take time off for own illness or care giving. I think over the course of the next year we hope to have a plan and recommendations on how to include these other types of leave as part of a compromise plan. Kathleen a republican from florida, go ahead. I wonder what kind of parameters they plan to put in place. When my husband was alive we had a small business. We had three employees. There is no way we could have paid 70 of her salary and held her job and hired somebody else to do her work while she was out for four or six weeks. Its a different ball game when you work for a Big Corporation where a lot of people are contributing but not necessarily taking advantage. I know its a very touchy subject but i think there are many, many young ladies out there who have children without any regard to the financial responsibility. And then when the child is born and needs care, they look to all these programs that are funded by other people while the law says very succinctly you cant tell me want to do about whether i have children or not, if youre spending my dime, i have a right to tell you. And i think that thats not addressed because its considered political suicide. Before you go, what kind of business did you and your husband run . We had a small honda dealership in st. Augustine, florida. And we had three people and our own two children. There is no way financially that we could have got your point on that. And thanks for the call and sharing your story. Thank you for those thoughts. First of all, on the impact on Small Businesses like yours, very important. We talked about it a lot. We found that the public when they 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. Now your point about how it could be disruptive even though somebody else is paying for it, to lose an employee for a while and have to replace them until they came back is absolutely right. So we did have some conversation about whether we should exempt Small Businesses. Did you in the end . I think what we ended up saying is for the smallest businesses, for businesses with fewer than 15 employees rather than the 50 employee that comes with the fmla. I think that exemption would be considered but its part of the design. The family medical leave act. Well give to that. I want to Say Something about her second point. Its a big issue. I read a whole book on your second issue and i want to tell you about my book called generation unbound drifting into sex and parenthood without marriage and it addresses right on the nail what you were talking about. The conclusion you would give to her if you want to sum up your book . My conclusion is that we need to help young women avoid these unplanned very early pregnancies and births that they are not prepared to have and arent ready to be good parents. Back to the phones, johnny in livingston, louisiana, independent. Good morning, jhonny. I have a comment and a question. A latenight talkshow host just had a baby and his wife, and his child had a heart defect. The childs parents should be automatically paid leave for that situation. Now my question is, is that can you please define how the Affordable Care act defines existing conditions versus the republican plan how they may define existing conditions . A bit of a different topic. Yeah. I do not know the details of the definition of preexisting conditions in the aca versus the republican bill and we have two republican bills. We have a house bill and now the Senate Working on it. Everything is a little up in the air. I really couldnt answer that question. Lets start on the front side of the question. It uses the example of Jimmy Kimmels situation. Can you talk a little bit about companies and types of businesses, 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 . So when we look at the landscape of which companies are offering paid leave policies it tends to be Larger Companies in tech and finance those kind of areas where workers are typically recruiting highskilled workers and want to retain those workers. They think there is a benefit to offering a competitive package that includes these policies. The workers who are not getting these policies, the workers with the least access are those in retail, in food and services, sort of leisure, hospitality, those kind of industries where workers are tend to be lowpaid and low benefits. They probably dont even imagine they have access to these kinds of policies. We do see these disparities. I think the biggest divide is if you a highwage worker you are more likely to get it and if you are a lowwage worker you are least likely to get it. We only have 14 of workers and that even have access to paid leave. We are not just talking about lowwage workers even though disparities are pretty obvious there. Its still a lot of middleincome, higherincome workers who dont necessarily have access to these policies. Thomas is a republican. Good morning. How are you . Doing well. Two simple questions to the guests. Number one i heard one of them say 600 a week should go to these women. And my next question is to each guest, is do they support planned parenthood . Id like to have an answer, please. Do you want to clarify the policy . The policy is that you get 70 of your normal wage, but only up to 600 per week. If you make 100,000 a year, youre still only going to get the 600. So its an attempt to make sure that the benefits go to people towards the lower end of the wage scale. I do support access to contraception for women. I think its very important, but i dont think its related to this issue all that much. That was not a policy recommendation included . No. No. We did not talk about that at all in our group. What is the next step for the work group report . Is it in the process of being turned into official legislation . Not at all. Were at the stage where were trying to get our report out to everybody. I think it offers a great framework for thinking about these issues as mentioned, the white house has shown a lot of interest in our report and they are interested in sort of continuing that conversation. So we are hoping this will sort of form the base for starting that conversation. I dont think were close to legislation yet. I do think we need to emphasize other types of leave. Instead of focusing on only the parental aspect of it. So many callers 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. If you want to find it, its very easy to find on the internet. Dorothy is in abilene, texas. Democrat. Good morning. Go ahead. Good morning. My name is dorothy. Yes, maam, youre on the air. Caller i was calling, this president he want to take our Social Security, take our medicare and all that. And he want to cut all the benefits th