Dear President Trump: I am writing to inform you on my opinion of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and how I believe the act can be amended to further benefit Americans. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was instated to help eligible employees of covered employers to counterbalance their home lives and work lives without being penalized in their job status, payment amount, and without the fear of losing employer-provided health insurance. President Clinton signed the law in 1993 and since then the law has been used more than 200 million times by women and men residing in the United States (Ness, Debra L.,2016.) I specifically want to focus on maternity leave and how it affects mothers, fathers, and newborns alike. While …show more content…
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States is the only country among 41 nations that does not mandate any type of paid leave for new parents (Livingston, Gretchen. 2016). Although the United States is the only country that does not have a national paid leave mandate in place, Rhode Island, California, and New Jersey have a state-mandated paid leave plan in place and New York will be included with these states as of January 1, 2018. While the rest of the states do offer a 12-week family and medical leave, often times a mother and father will go back to their jobs a lot sooner after the birth of a child because for the average person it would simply be unaffordable to raise a newborn and not have any income. A recent study done by Jody Heymann (2016), the founding director of the World Policy and Analysis Center at UCLA says that there are very powerful, long-term studies that show that when maternity leave is paid, infant mortality rates are lowered. For example, women who have sufficient paid maternity leave are much more likely to breastfeed, which lowers the risk of infectious diseases, it increases and improves cognitive outcomes, and also has benefits for the women’s health. In a study conducted by Pinka Chatterji and Sara Markowitz (2017) for the National Bureau of Economic …show more content…
In my opinion, she had the right idea with funding paid leave by making the wealthy pay their fair share without increasing taxes on the working families. Clinton also proposed the idea of ensuring that hardworking Americans get at least two-thirds of their current wages, up to a ceiling, while on leave. While this would not be the full amount that they would have earned if they were working, it is at least some source of income that for most people, is needed to support a family. Another issue that I have regarding the current Family and Medical Leave Act is that I believe that paid family and medical leave is something that should be available to all those in the workforce, not just those who have employers that offer it. For example, about 40 percent of workers are not eligible for FMLA protections because their employers are either too small or the individual has not worked for them long enough or for enough hours. I am fully in support of paid family and paid medical leave, and I do not believe it is something that should be overlooked, or referred to as “women’s issues,” because this is something that affects the family as a whole and plays a crucial role in the life