By: Jessie Bur (Federal Times)
Federal employee groups are calling on Congress to include provisions in the final National Defense Authorization Act for 2020 that would guarantee civil servants 12 weeks of paid leave in the event of the birth or adoption of a child or a family member falling critically ill.
“The idea that in 2019 federal employees don’t have paid leave to use to welcome a new child into the family or to care for a sick and aging family member is truly unacceptable. As one of the country’s largest employers, the U.S. government should be leading this effort. Candidly, it should be a model employer, but instead they’re lagging behind the private sector employers and nearly every other industrialized country in the world,” Tony Reardon, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in an Oct. 10 press call. “This is a proven program that helps employees and keeps employees.”
The federal government has struggled in recent years to both attract and retain new employees, especially in the younger generations, to replace the large number of employees that are set to retire in coming years.
Both the House and the Senate have had individual bills introduced that would put in place a paid family leave policy, and the House moved to add it to their version of the NDAA in July, in order to increase the bill’s chances of passage.
The family leave legislation was not added to the Senate’s version of the bill, and a September Senate vote to instruct the members of the conference for that bill to push for family leave inclusion failed by a single vote.
But, according to Reardon, that vote is not the be-all end-all for family leave inclusion in the NDAA.
Federal employee unions have been able to negotiate for paid maternity and paternity leave in certain select agencies, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, but that policy is not applicable across the federal government and only applies to parental leave.
Federal employees are currently guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid leave to take care of a new child or sick relative and can replace that time with other forms of paid leave such as sick leave or annual time off.
But employees from the FDA and IRS present on the call spoke to how those forms of leave are insufficient, as many employees can’t afford to take unpaid time and instead end up using up all of their other paid options.