Sen. Faith Winter has been trying to solve a problem so intractable the entire nation has grappled with it for decades — how to provide workers with paid leave when they or a member of their family, including newborns, need care.
Winter has been diligently chipping away at this issue in Colorado for years. She has patiently educated us all about the need for paid family leave. She has researched policies in other states extensively. She has commissioned a task force to study the issue and she has been willing to compromise.
Sadly, it appears compromise is now a dirty word in American politics. Two co-sponsors of Winter’s paid family leave bill withdrew their support just as the Colorado General Assembly began to consider the legislation. Rep. Matt Gray has kept his name on the bill, meaning it’s still possible for the legislation to move through the Senate and the House even without co-sponsors Rep. Monica Duran and Sen. Angela Williams.
We don’t mean to say this is an easy policy to develop and implement — in fact it is extremely difficult. The Denver Post editorial board was still researching the specifics of Winter’s bill when we learned it seemed likely the bill would die — not because of opposition from the right but because of opposition from the left.
Why is that so concerning? It’s a symptom of the times where our political parties are discouraging compromise and favoring a my-way-or-the-highway mentality. The art of compromise is something that Colorado politicians are acclaimed for embracing and the last thing Coloradans should want is a gridlocked system.
We think there are multiple ways to ensure that Colorado employees are paid during times of extended leave to care for a sick or dying relative, to care for a long-term illness or to care for a newborn. To clarify, most full-time employees who have been with a company for at least a year are already guaranteed job protection for 12 weeks through federal law for many of those emergency needs, including the birth of a child for both men and women. The trick is to find a way so that all, or at least a portion, of that leave is also paid.
As we understand the legislation proposed by Winters and Gray, an employee must have worked 180 days with a company before state law would mandate the employer provide paid leave. That is 36 work-weeks or half a year for a full-time employee before they qualify. That’s far more comprehensive coverage than the status quo and is surely a step in the right direction. It also would allow part-time workers to eventually get coverage, although it may take more than a year to hit the 180-day mark if it’s a part-time gig. Could some compromise be met to make sure that part-time employees are covered more quickly? We would hope lawmakers could hammer that problem out. Requiring some period of continuous work before an employee is eligible for the benefit can protect employers, but increasingly Americans are working multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet.
It would be a shame for these ideas — who gets covered and for how long, and the best mechanism to fund that coverage — to not get a hearing because lawmakers are unwilling to compromise or perhaps unwilling to really heed the concerns of this state’s business community.
Perhaps the legislation is too complicated for us to expect it to pass half-way through the legislative session but at the very least Winter’s bill deserves a robust hearing that hammers out all the potential flaws and benefits of this approach to the paid family leave problem.
Employees and employers deserve a chance at a system that will work for everyone.
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