The Los Angeles City Council will consider today whether to begin studying a proposal to provide city employees who are new parents with four weeks of paid time off to allow them to bond with their children.
Councilman Paul Krekorian, who along with Councilwoman Nury Martinez is pushing for the new city worker benefit, said he is “hopeful that this effort will lead Los Angeles to join the ranks of other U.S. cities and the military by offering competitive, family-friendly benefits for our workers.”
“It is time for L.A., and the United States as a whole, to catch up with the rest of the world,” he said.
Employers in European countries like France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, as well as other major nations like China, Mexico and Russia, already provide some form of paid parental leave, according to Krekorian.
In the United States, private employers like Wal-Mart, Ernst & Young, Bank of America and many tech companies have also started to offer “some measure of paid parental leave,” he said.
Other municipal employers such as Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago are also starting to look into paid parental time off, he said.
Krekorian and Martinez put in the initial request for the study last September. If the motion is approved by the full City Council, the City Administrative Officer and the Chief Legislative Analyst would report back on the “feasibility and budgetary impact” of offering four weeks of paid parental time to new parents.
City officials would also report back on the average amount of time city workers take off for pregnancy and bonding purposes, and the “costs and consequences” of employees potentially getting lured away from the city due to better benefits elsewhere.
City employees currently have four months of unpaid leave to bond with their children. In order to get paid during that time, some employees use a mixture of accrued paid vacation and sick leave hours, according to city officials.
Employee representatives and city workers told the Budget and Finance Committee last month that some workers face resistance from supervisors when trying to use sick leave hours to get compensated for parental bonding time, while newer employees may not have enough paid sick leave accrued to cover parental leave.
The motion was introduced the motion last year after companies like Netflix and Microsoft announced they were going to begin providing enhanced family leave benefits.
Netflix executives planned to offer up to a year’s worth of paid parental leave hours, reportedly to salaried employees but not to hundreds of lower-paid hourly workers at the company’s distribution centers.
In the wake of the Netflix announcement, Microsoft said it would offer an additional eight weeks of paid time off for new mothers and their partners, bringing the amount of time off to 20 weeks for mothers, and to 12 weeks for their partners.
