🔒Employers offering dads more of a (paid) break at work

Good news for anyone looking to start a family: Paid parental leave for fathers is no longer a unicorn.

At least judging from the cascade of announcements from a diverse range of employers in just the past year.

During that time, at least 17 big employers, including at least one with a Hartford presence, have either introduced or expanded paid leave options for new dads.

Only one of them — Hilton — offered what is considered the bare minimum of 2 weeks. Other companies, by contrast, now offer anywhere from 6 weeks to 26 weeks, or in the case of Netflix, as much time as a new parent needs in the first year.

“The rate of expansion is unprecedented,” said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work.

That doesn't mean, however, that paid time off for fathers is commonplace. Less than 20 percent of U.S. employers offer paid paternity leave, according to 2015 survey findings from the Society for Human Resource Management.

Nor does it mean that having the option of paid leave is the same as taking it. A survey by Deloitte found that 36 percent of men said they would not take advantage of their paid parental leave benefits because they're afraid it might jeopardize their position at work.

But that may start to change as more employers start to offer it. They're doing so in large part because companies are in an arms race with competitors to attract Millennials and keep their best talent on board.

When consulting firm EY, which has an office in downtown Hartford, announced it would offer 16 paid weeks to new dads, up from six previously, the company said that it “hopes its men understand EY's serious commitment to enabling them to become the kind of parents they want to be.”

One of the most publicized expansions of paid parental leave came at Facebook, which now lets men and women take 4 months following the birth of a baby, up from 4 weeks previously.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously took two months off when his daughter, Max, was born. “Studies show that when working parents take time to be with their newborns, outcomes are better for the children and families,” Zuckerberg said when announcing his decision.

The push toward providing more paid leave for dads started in early 2015, when a few other large companies — including Johnson & Johnson and Goldman Sachs — expanded paternity leave or more gender-neutral, parental-leave policies.

But in keeping with the fact that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not require paid time off for new parents, the policies are all over the place.

Some employers offer far more time than others, of course. But even within a company, a policy may not apply equally to all fathers at a firm. Sometimes hourly employees aren't included or their benefits are less generous than those of salaried workers.

In an effort to ensure all workers get at least some paid time off for parenting and other family care obligations, there have been legislative efforts to set a floor on what must be offered. To date, four states — California, New Jersey, Rhode Island and New York — have passed guaranteed paid family leave laws. And cities like New York, Portland and San Francisco have adopted their own paid parental leave policies.

There are ongoing efforts to do the same at the federal level and in at least 15 other states. Connecticut's state legislature considered a bill earlier this year that would allow employees in companies of three or more workers to take up to 12 weeks of fully paid leave a year to care for their own illness or the illness of a number of extended family members. The proposal, which would have been funded by employee contributions (equal to a 0.54 percent payroll tax on all wages and bonuses), passed out of the Labor and Public Employees Committee but failed to gain further traction.

The Connecticut Business & Industry Association and other commerce groups opposed the measure arguing the “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn't make sense in the modern workplace, where many businesses already offer flexible work hours or options like telecommuting. They also raised concerns about the future costs of the program (estimated to be $462 million annually) leading to tax increases.

Companies that have introduced or expanded their paid leave for fathers of newborns include: Amazon, Facebook, Fidelity, Hilton and Twitter, among others.

Not surprisingly, paid parental leave is one of the most heavily weighted factors that Fatherly, the news site for Millennial dads, considered when compiling its list of the Best Places to Work for New Dads in 2016.n

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