March 1, 2018
Katie Bethell, PL+US Founder and Executive Director, on changing workplace policies to better support parents.
Walmart will soon offer better parental leave than most U.S. companies. The new policy for biological parents, announced in January, will go into effect on March 1, according to a company spokesperson. The company already has rolled out a more generous policy for adoptive parents.
This matters because America remains one of just three countries without paid maternity leave, and Walmart is America’s biggest employer. With 1.5 million U.S. employees, its workforce is bigger than the populations of roughly a dozen U.S. states. While the policy only applies to full-time workers, that is still hundreds of thousands of people.