Senate Republicans Offer Their Own Paid Family Leave Proposal

Republican senators on Tuesday reintroduced a measure that would extend paid family leave protections for U.S. workers, offering a GOP alternative to a Democratic proposal put forth days earlier on a topic that could be a defining issue heading into the 2016 presidential race.

The Family Friendly and Workplace Flexibility Act would allow employers and employees in the private sector to come to agreements by which hourly workers could put overtime earned toward paid leave rather than extra compensation. The bill is sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., and Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.

“Countless Americans face the daily reality of having more to do with less time to do it, and though Congress can’t legislate another hour in the day we can provide working Americans with more options for how to organize their time,” McConnell said in a statement Tuesday.

A similar system exists for employees in the public sector. However, private companies employing hourly, non-exempt employees are required under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act to pay time-and-a-half for overtime work. The Republican proposal would amend that law, letting employers voluntarily offer an hour and a half in compensatory time off for every hour of overtime worked. The employee could choose whether to accept the leave time or the overtime pay.

The measure was introduced in the last Congress, where it passed the House but did not make it out of committee in the then-Democratic controlled Senate. With Republicans regaining the Senate in November, Isakson is now the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety.

Democrats are pushing their own family paid leave initiatives. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., reintroduced a bill last week that would create a federal insurance program financed by payroll taxes on both the employer and employee to fund up to 12 weeks a year of paid leave for workers meeting certain family or medical requirements. While the prospects for that bill appear bleak in the GOP-controlled Congress, Democrats looked poised to capitalize politically next year from their support of the issue, which polls have shown resonates with Americans.

Similar state-level programs are in place in California, New Jersey and Rhode Island have enacted, while proposals in New York, Connecticut and Colorado have also advanced in recent weeks. Some states are considering measures that would provide tax credits for employers that offer paid family leave programs for workers. Only 12 percent of workers nationwide have access to paid family leave, while 59 percent of workers can take unpaid leave under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act.

Some in the business community have endorsed a family-paid insurance program, but conservative lobbying groups prefer the leave-time alternative.

“This bill would do a lot to promoting flexible strategies in the workplace without additional costs,” says Beth Milito, senior executive counsel at National Federation of Independent Business. "This is a win-win for employers and employees."

Meanwhile, some workers’ advocates have pushed back on the Republican measure, saying it would actually do more harm than good for employees with families.

“This bill reportedly will give workers more time with their families, but you only get to spend more time with your family after you’ve been forced to spend more time away from them, working overtime,” says Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work. She is also concerned that workers who need overtime pay will be passed over in favor of those who prefer leave time when overtime opportunities arise, since that option would be cheaper for companies. In addition, she suggested employers could still impose limits on when workers could take the leave time they earned.

“When [the Fair Labor Standards Act] was written, it was designed to provide a disincentive to employers to make people work too many hours,” Bravo says. “This bill creates an incentive for more overtime by making it cheaper.”