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MAY 17, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
Don't Fret, Said Alito; There's Family Leave!
But there's
**paid**family leave only in states where abortion is legal and will
remain so. No state where it's being criminalized would consider such
post-birth decency.
Just as Chief Justice John Roberts, in his 2013 decision striking down
the core of the Voting Rights Act, serenely asserted that the white
racism of Southern states was a thing of the past, so Associate Justice
Sam Alito, in his leaked decision revoking a woman's right to an
abortion, blithely claimed that America had become a far friendlier
place than it once was for women who'd be compelled to bear children.
After all, he noted, there was a law on the books that hadn't been
there when his predecessors created that right in
**Roe v. Wade**: the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires
businesses with 50 or more employees to grant up to 12 weeks of leave
for such non-work distractions as caring for newborns.
What Alito failed to note was that the law doesn't require employers
to pay their caregiving workers anything when they're home with their
infants. Requiring employers to pay would have upset the delicate
balance of power between capital and labor by giving workers an actual
smidgen of power.
Among the 38 Western nations with advanced or semi-advanced economies
that comprise the OECD, the U.S. is the only one without a paid family
leave program (though, of course, it was part of President Biden's
late, lamented Build Back Better package). Among the other 37, the
average time in which employers are required to pay their workers who
are tending to their families is 50 weeks. I don't think our
exceptionalism in this is because we're necessarily more anti-family
than all our fellow nations; I think it's because we're more
capitalistic in a particularly mean and stunted way, viewing any
assertion of worker rights as a threat to cosmic routine.
That said, we do have a federal system, and under it, ten states and the
District of Columbia have each enacted paid family leave programs of
their own. None of them requires employers to help their workers for
anything like 50 weeks, heaven forfend; 12 weeks seems to be the upper
limit of our requirements for employer display of humanity. Among those
ten states, the programs are already up and running in California,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Washington,
Connecticut, and D.C., while they're still on the drawing boards or in
tryout mode in Oregon, Colorado, and Maryland.
Notice anything else about those states? They're all states that have
their own laws legalizing abortion; they're solidly blue states with
strong pro-choice majorities. In the states where trigger laws have
already been passed banning or restricting abortion as soon as Alito's
screed becomes the law of the land, and in other Republican-run states
now crafting anti-choice diktats, however, the very idea of paid leave
remains anathema. In South Dakota, where Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has
repeatedly shown she'll do anything to slither up the Republican
right's list of vice-presidential possibles, the legislature passed
and Noem signed a law last year forbidding cities and counties from
enacting paid family leave ordinances of their own-lest some
bomb-throwing Fargo malcontents think they can sneak a fast one past
redoubtable Kristi.
So it's in the states where women will be compelled to carry
pregnancies to term that many of those women and their families will be
on their own financially from the moment the child emerges from the
sanctity of the womb into the hardscrabble penury of life outside, and
from the fervent defense of the pro-life movement into its utter
indifference to life post-womb.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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Republicans Are Working Themselves Into a Murder Frenzy
The Buffalo racist mass murderer parroted Fox News talking points. BY
RYAN COOPER
Fake Populism vs. Real Populism
Will voters see through the phony kind and give true economic populists
a hearing? BY ROBERT KUTTNER
Let's Not Grant Saudi Arabia a Blank Check for American Support
Fareed Zakaria's latest idea for a diplomatic bargain with the country
is too clever by half. BY TRITA PARSI & STEVEN SIMON
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