As I have written, the pandemic has created new awareness that without affordable child care, many workers cannot go back to their jobs, the economy will not fully reopen, and unemployment and negative growth will continue. In other words, Democrats who have long supported paid leave may finally convince Republicans that subsidized child care is neither a luxury nor a women’s issue, but rather is a core economic issue.
Likewise, the time may now be ripe to pursue paid family leave. A progressive group, Paid Leave for All, is mounting a campaign to support paid leave for all workers. In the short run, it has its eyes on passing the expanded leave provisions in the Heroes Act.
Paid Leave for All has a political opening to seek expanded and permanent paid leave. As John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira wrote in The Post, a large cadre of voters who had supported President Barack Obama chose President Trump in 2016 but now are ready to vote for the Democratic presumptive nominee, former vice president Joe Biden. These voters turn out to be economically progressive with more than 70 percent favoring paid leave. Another survey found that “before the U.S. coronavirus crisis took off, a majority of Americans already supported a new paid family and medical leave plan; Republicans were opposed, but ambivalently so.” Then, as the pandemic spread and worsened, Republican support for paid leave went up. Paid leave is also popular in battleground states, according to a survey Paid Leave for All took in May.
Now Paid Leave for All has looked at so-called moderate voters, who tend to be represented in greater numbers in the 50-to-64 age category than voters overall and who are more likely to be independents and married as compared to the electorate as a whole. In a poll conducted by the Democratic firm Lake Research Partners that was shared with me, voters indicate by wide margins (60 percent) that government should help with paid leave, while “79% say most people can’t afford to take unpaid time off … [and] 75% say most people should be able to take paid time off.” As a policy matter, the paid medical leave provision of the Cares Act drew 85 percent support. Thirty-nine percent said two weeks was enough; 41 percent said it was not enough. Support for 12 weeks of paid coronavirus-related leave garnered 79 percent, and a permanent policy of paid leave for new parents for up to 12 weeks drew 71 percent support (46 percent strongly support it).
The pollsters also found that voters are supportive of expanding the paid leave in the Cares Act. More than three-quarters of voters favor 12 weeks of paid leave to recover from covid-19; 77 percent support expanding paid leave to employers with more than 500 employees; and 73 percent favor giving such leave to care for “adults who need help with self-care and whose place of care is closed or whose caregiver is unavailable.”
In short, support for paid leave is a no-brainer politically for all but hard-core Republicans. Prized independent and battleground voters will be pleased with support for paid leave measures. Paid leave turns out to be one more issue that a year ago would have been politically risky to embrace. No more.
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