Time - USA (2021-03-15)

74 Time March 15/March 22, 2021

industrialized country that doesn’t man-
date paid parental leave nationally, and
the federal government doesn’t fund uni-
versal pre-K even though studies show
that access to early childhood educa-
tion boosts the number of women in
the workforce and economic prosper-
ity. The Family and Medical Leave Act
(FMLA) mandates that employers offer
12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave,
but about 40% of American workers are
not covered by this law. Only nine states
and Washington, D.C., have passed their
own paid-family-leave legislation. And
just 20% of private- sector workers get
paid family leave from their employers.
Many parents cannot afford to take un-
paid leave, and those who do take time
off often feel pressure to return to work
or worry that they will seem dispens-
able. The concern is justified. Thomas A.
McKinney, an attorney bringing several
suits involving parental leave in New Jer-
sey, says mothers have become an “easy
target” for companies looking to lay off
employees during the pandemic.
Kristen Horine, who worked for a
company in Ohio that designs parks, says
she initially resisted taking family leave
when her manager said she was eligible
under FFCRA. She was used to working
nights and weekends, and she and her
husband were trading off child care du-
ties for their toddler and kindergartner
at home. It was stressful, but not impos-
sible. Ultimately, though, she told her-
self that leave could be an opportunity
to bond with her sons.
“I was thankful that I had this time
with them,” she says. “But there was
this immense amount of anxiety and
fear about what would happen in the fu-
ture, with the pandemic but also with my
career... I started to see all of my proj-
ects that I had been working on—that I
had poured my heart into— divvied up
between other co workers. And my big-
gest fear was they would start to look at
projections and who had clients and who
didn’t have clients, and I wasn’t there.”
Just before the end of her leave, Ho-
rine and several co workers who had
taken family leave were told that because
there was no longer enough work, they
were all fired. Horine has now joined two
other parents in a lawsuit against their
former employer. It alleges that when the
company cut staff at the end of June, the

only employees laid off were the ones

who had taken family leave, even though

expanded FMLA was put in place to pro-

vide not only relief but also an assurance

that if a worker takes leave, she would

return to her same job or an equivalent

one at the end of it. (Horine’s former em-

ployer declined to comment.)

Horine points out that this same com-

pany once asked her to bring her sons

to a park that it had helped design for a

recruiting video in which talking heads

mention family values seven times. She

says this emphasis on family was one of

the reasons she felt comfortable uproot-

ing her family and moving from Philadel-

phia to take the job.

For working parents, such cognitive

dissonance is not unique to this year. It’s

a grand American tradition. In surveys,

most Americans still say it’s not ideal for

a child to be raised by two working par-

turned from the front, the government

dismantled the program. “We just don’t

have an infra structure of care that’s pub-

licly supported in this country in a re-

ally robust way,” says Melissa Murray,

a law professor at New York University.

“When we think about caregiving, we as-

sume it is a private responsibility. And

when something like this happens, it be-

comes obvious how cobbled together

this whole network is. More important,

it also becomes painfully obvious that

the real public support for caregiving

in this country is school, which I don’t

think people fully appreciated before the

pandemic.”

So it was a historic day on March 18 of

last year when Congress passed FFCRA,

which, among other things, expanded

FMLA to include up to 12 weeks of paid

leave for employees whose children’s

schools or day cares had closed. Most of

those covered were entitled to two-thirds

of their salaries, capped at $200 per day.

Still, the bill contained carve-outs

that chiseled away at its efficacy: Com-

panies with more than 500 employees

were exempt, which meant that Ameri-

ca’s biggest, wealthiest companies didn’t

owe their workers any family leave. Com-

panies with fewer than 50 employees

could seek an exemption, so few employ-

ees at small businesses were covered.

Health care providers and emergency

responders weren’t entitled to leave. In

total, CAP estimates that 68 million to

106 million private-sector workers did

not qualify for leave under FFCRA.

Tamara Brown’s 11-year-old loves

to bake. “Sometimes it’s strawberry

shortcake,” she says. “But his brownies—

that is his thing. He will say, ‘Let me

show you, Mom, how to do it,’ like I never

taught him. That’s our bonding time.”

Lately, though, when he opens the

fridge, eggs or other ingredients might

be missing. “There are moments where

he says, ‘Mama, we don’t have this,’ ”

Brown says. She waits for him to turn

his attention to something else so she

doesn’t have to explain that she’s been

choosing between buying certain grocer-

ies and paying for utilities.

Before the pandemic, Brown, a sin-

gle mother, had been looking to buy a

house. Now she’s worried about making

rent. “We’re living on a need basis, not a

ents. And yet pre pandemic, two-thirds

of U.S. families were two-income house-

holds, and 41% of mothers were the

breadwinners. A mass exodus of women

from the workforce isn’t just a women’s

problem: the Center for American Prog-

ress (CAP) and the Century Foundation

estimated that if women remained out of

the workforce at the same levels as last

spring for a year, it would cost the coun-

try $64.5 billion.

But the U.S. government has never

been all that eager to establish programs

that would make working mothers’ lives

more manageable. During World War II,

Congress approved funding for a univer-

sal childcare system so women could

produce fighter planes and combat gear

in factories. But as soon as the men re-

SPECIAL REPORT

WOMEN and the PANDEMIC

‘In the middle of this

PANDEMIC, you

still want your child

to have some form

of normalcy.’

—Tamara Brown