Alright, good afternoon, everyone, welcome to our budget and finance subcommittee meeting. I am katy tang and i will be chairing this meeting instead of supervisor farrell, it is march 23, 2016. To my left, im joined by supervisor yee and to my right, we have scott wiener, filling in, our clerk is linda wong. And wed like to thank sf gov tv, if we can get a motion to excuse supervisor farrell from our meeting from today. Moved by supervisor yee, seconded by supervisor wiener, yes, without objection, hes excused, madam clerk . Please silence all cell phone and is electronic devices, cop pis of any documents to be included as part of the files to be submit today the clerk, items acted upon today will appear on the april 5th supervised sores agenda unless otherwise stated. Er if we can tall item 1, please. Er item 1 is an ard nones amend thing police code to require employers to provide supplemental compensation to employees who are receiving state paid family leave for purposes of bonding with a new child. Er thank you, and since supervisor wieners the sponsor of this, im going turn it over the him first thank you very much, supervisor tang, and thank you for to the committee for hearing this important item today. Colleagues, before us today is legislation that will make San Francisco the first jurisdiction s nr the United States to guarantee all parents six fully paid weeks of parental leave in order to bond with a new child applying to both parents, applying both to natural birth, as well as adoption, this is trend setting legislation and it is long overdue as the United States is so vastly far behind the rest of the world on this important issue. I want to thank supervisor cohen for signing on as a cosponsor to the legislation. Colleagues, it is frankly surprising and troubling reality in this country that a huge portion of workers in this country can give birth or adopt or bring in a foster child today and be required to go back to work tomorrow. For many of the choices between bonding with a new child and putting food on the table, this is not a real choice at all and it is not a choice that anyone should have to make. Even though there is huge body of work, literature showing the time spent bonding with a child is critical for the health and development of that child, economic realities for many people mean that bonding time unfortunately must take a backseat to economic survival. Some have even offered that this is the start of the achievement gap. The vast majority of the world, and i mean truly the vast majority of the world, has recognized the importance of parental leave and provides mothers and often fathers time off from work to help build the necessary foundations for a new family. The United States on the other hand is shamefully at the back of the line and is one of only four country ins the world na do not required paid Maternity Leave, the other three countries are swaz siland, mosoto and pap poe ya new guinea, you have the right to take up to three months of unpaid time off. This is unworkable for all too many, only 12 have access to paid family leave through their employers. When we talk about income and equality in the United States, dealing with the needs of a family including parental leave factor into that equation, if we want to really start addressing income and equality in this country, there are many things we need to do and better access to paid parental leave is one of them. The percentage of employers offering fully paid parental leave has declined in recent years from about 17 in 2005 to 9 in 2014, and only half of firsttime mothers take any type of paid leave. Excuse me, unpaid leave. Some firms are leading the way in providing parental leave, among states, california is one of just three that provides some level of paid parental leave, new jersey and rode island are the others and washington dc is considering moving in that direction. These are all funded through employee contributions through staterun Insurance Programs. In many ways, california leads the way in the u. S. , yet we are still very far behind the rest of the world. Californias program for paid parental leave is paid for by workers, most people who work in california pay into the state disability program, which in turn funds the paid Family Leave Program. Established in 2004 and the state Program Provides six weeks of paid family leave at 55 wage replacement, so you maintain just in excess of half of your pay. This works for some people, but for people who are lower income in particular, it creates a huge hardship in terms of that level of income reduction even with that limited access, the States Program has increased into concrete benefits for families. Mothers who use the state program are more likely to initiate breastfeeding and to continue breastfeeding for approximately twice as long as mothers who do not use the program, the program doubled the average length of leave taken by new mothers from three weeks to between 6 and 7 weeks, the greatest gains are among mothers with lower levels of education, unmarried mothers, latina mothers and African American mothers. Men who take two or more waoex off after the birth of a child are more involved than fathers who take no leave in terms of the direct care of their children 9 months later. 83 of workers in lower level jobs who lower income jobs who use the program are returned to their previous employer, a 10 point improvement compared to workers who did not use the program. Paid leave increases worker productivity, improves loyalty and moral. But even with these positive status, ix theres still a lot of room in our state to grow, many do not participate in the state program because they cannot afford to take a nearly 50 pay cut, the proposal before us today, colleagues, is structured to mirror and complement the state of californias program by taking the 55 wage replacement or 6 weeks that the state provides and extending it to 100 , our ordinance would require that San Francisco employers with 20 or more workers provide a contribution of that 45 so that the employee enjoys full wage replacement for that six week period. This legislation will help make sure that people here in San Francisco have access truly to a full six weeks of bonding time with their new child. Were honor today have unanimous support of both the commission on the status of women and the Youth Commission. Since the introduction of this legislation, colleague, we have worked with a broad group of stakeholders including in the Business Community, through that process, numerous meetings, conversations, a lot of correspondence, many issues were identified and raised and last week, i introduced a series of amendments to take into account some of the concerns that were expressed by the Business Community, we want to make sure that we have an open door and i want to thank the Business Community for formalizing and putting down in writing what its requests were. Key amendments that we made were one, that an employee must work at the employer for at least 90 days or three months before claiming benefits in order to be eligible, in addition, an employee must repay his or her supplemental parental leave benefit if he or she voluntarily separates from employment within 90 days of the end of the leap period, in other words, people need to come back to work for three months. We amended the legislation to provide a simplified record retention requirement for employers, we pushed back the operative date to january 1 of next year in order to align with the beginning of the calendar year. We the legislation now provides greater guidance for employers and employees for situations where an employee works multiple concurrent jobs, the legislation also is much clearer about addressing the issue of fluctuation and income by employees, in addition, the legislation exempts workers covered by a collective Bargaining Agreement until the next collective bargaining is executed, not conflicting with an existing Bargaining Agreement coming into effect with the subsequent negotiation of a collective bargaining grekt, and today i distributed a few minor clarifying cleanup amendment, theyre nonsubstantive, they wont require a continuance to clarify things like benefit calculations in the event that the employee is on unpaid leave prior to the bonding period and also to clarify the scope of the cba exemption. I want to thank the advocates who worked with us and provided a lot of information who have also been very active at the state level including the california work and family coalition, the league aid Society Employment law center, equal rights advocates and the opportunity institute, i also want to thank ted e began and his staff at the office of Economic Analysis for their report issued today and ill have some questions and comments about that report. So, colleagues, and finally i want to thank andres power in my office for doing an enormous amount of work to move this forward. So, colleagues, if there are no comments or questions, i would i see supervisor yee is on the roster. Supervisor yee . Thank you, i want to thank supervisor wiener for bringing this issue up, as you know, as he mentioned, california is one of the few states that does anything and even what it does is not adequate, i know that ive been part of a group for several decades now trying to one way or another get the federal government to provide for this parental paid leave. Its something that, you know, weve tried everything we can, pressure, voicing ourselves, embarrassing the federal government saying how could you, were really the only developed nation that doesnt have a paid leave policy, a federal one, so for us to do it locally and really pave the way, im very supportive. I do have some concerns about this piece of legislation and let me put it on the table so that hopefully we will address it. Theres the question of whos paying for this and in particular, those in the nonprofit sector, and if i take, for example, probably the ones thats going to be pretty stressed in trying to make this work would be folks in the child care field. Why is that . Because in order to make up the difference, where are they going to find it . Its going to be hard enough to say to the parents, can you pay more now its already 25 of your income that youre paying for child care, or do we say to the workers, can we give you less than minimum wage, thats all youre getting right now. The equation of making things balance between what comes in in termser of revenue and is what goes out in terms of expenses for Child Care Centers is close to being flat equal, so and one might ask, but were only six weeks in, were only talking about 3,600 per parent, it is 3,600 that the employee might get, however, in a child care center, or when you take care of children, youre restricted to a ratio that you have to abide by, whether its for the preschool at 18 or a toddler at 16 or infants at 14 or 3, so you must not only pay that employee but you have to bring in a sub at the same rate just about, so it becomes 7,200 in which we have to find a way to help these people, otherwise, were going to find Centers Closing down, were going to find families not able to get child care and its a big concern of the field, and to a lot of parents too, so i know that we dont have the answers here and certainly this is an issue and its certainly something that we need to Pay Attention to, but i still think that the overall value of this legislation really is more positive than negative. I really think that San Francisco should do this, we need to get california on board to do more, we need to embarrass the federal government to be like the rest of the developed countries, so im making a pledge, wed like to get the mayors office, get our city to look at this particular issue. Im going to look forward to working i dont know if supervisor wiener would like to work with me in trying to mitigate this issue because this is a big issue for those providers, but you know, again, i want to thank you, supervisor wiener, for bringing this up. I think it is a great thing to do that our parents deserve what other parents are getting in other countries. Thank you, supervisor yee. And so before we go to ted e ga n from our office of on the Economic Impact report, i wanted to also say thank you supervisor wiener for bringing this issue forward, many of the statements that you have made were things that we also in our office acknowledged last year when we were working on prop b which had to do specifically with City Employees and trying to create a Better Program and trying to set the bar for i think the private sector discussion in the private sector and we had launched in conjunction with the passage of prop b a task force that compromised of advocates, of the Business Community and so forth, and coming up with other ideas for how we could address this issue, again, not just in City Government but outside as well, so weve had several meetings and discussions about different policy ideas, and so i think that, you know, really, i support the shared goal of this, but i think i do have a couple of concerns that supervisor yee, one of them he raised, so the issue about the thresholds, i completely understand why it is currently set at 20 or more employees, something that i am very interested in is talking about whether we could potentially amend the legislation so that it would apply to companies with 50 or more employees, and this speaks to a lot of the Small Businesses and the concerns that were raised at the Small BusinessCommission Just this week, as supervisor yee mentioned, its not just about that payment made to the employee whos going on parental leave, its also about back filling services, finding replacements and in the Service Industries or a child care industry, its really hard to do that and especially with their Economic Situation such as child care providers, where are you going to find the funds to did that, so thats a pressing concern but not to take away the goal of this legislation at all, i fully support that, so at some point after our economic m pact report, i would like to see if we could potentially entertain a motion to that effect. Another question i do have is whether we could address the issue of the private right of action thats been included in this legislation, i want to see if there is an ability for us to remove that from this, again, we really want to get businesses on board with this and i think eliminating that additional potential issue for them, i hope, will incentivize more companies to come into compliance with this new regulation, and then thirdly, just to make sure that i know supervisor wiener already addressed changes, if they happen at the state level, and that it would automatically adjust what is required of the city and our businesses here in San Francisco and i really appreciate that and i really hope the state takes a harder look at this issue and does a lot more to incentivize parental leave, so if there are changes though at the federal level, any improvements there which we also hope for, im wondering if there are amendments we can make to also incorporate some sort of automatic trigger for us here in San Francisco so that there isnt this sort of double payment, so all that to say again, support this completely in concept, i think theres just a couple of outstanding issues that i have and i hope we can sort through. Supervisor wiener . Thank you, supervisor tang, and i wanted to thank you for your work around paid parental leave, the work that you did last year to really modernize and improve paid parental leave for City Employees, it was trend setting and im appreciative of the work youve done, i know this is a shared value here. I also a few things, regarding and this has been suggested to us in terms of what happens if theres a future federal paid Parental Leave Program. Now, im not holding my breath for the near future given the meltdown that has happened in washington dc, but who knows, we could have a mom in the speakers chair and a mom in the whoit house in the not too distant faou khu, maybe there will be an earthquake in washington and well get some change. The challenge and we did work with the City Attorney to see if we could come up with an amendment to address this. The problem is that if there is a future federal paid Parental Leave Program, we have no idea what that program will look like, who will be eligible, what its scope is, its hard to structure an automatic amendment or change that will happen if we get a federal program in the future without knowing what that program is. What i would be prepared to do is offer an oral amendment today to require that if a federal paid Parental Leave Program is enacted, then within lets say 90 days of that law being signed by the president , the controller would automatically prepare an analysis of the federal law, an analysis of how it interacts and intersects with our local law and then indicating possible amendments to our local law to make sure that we are not in any way conflicting with federal law or not, or covering the same ground that federal law covers and the supervisors could consider that, i will offer that amendment again after Public Comment. In terps of the 20 employees versus 50 employees, i know this has been a topic of discussion and i completely respect the point