Oct 29, 2021
How did President Joe Biden's promised 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave in the initially proposed Build Back Better plan get whittled down to four weeks and then, because that was somehow still too much, get cut out completely?
To put things into perspective, the United States is the only industrialized nation without a federal paid leave mandate, though some states—like California, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia—do have paid leave plans in place. According to data from the World Policy Analysis Center at the University of California, the global average for paid maternity leave is 29 weeks and the average paid paternity leave is 16 weeks.