Pittsburgh Nurses Score Historic Win For Paid Parental Leave

Jean Stone is a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, and she has watched the same scene play out so many times it has become almost ordinary: once their babies stabilize in the NICU, parents return to work to preserve whatever parental leave they have left for when their baby finally comes home. Stone calls them in the middle of the day with updates, beginning each call with the words "everything is OK" before she says anything else, and watches them arrive at the end of their workday carrying the weight of having been somewhere else all day. She calls it the weight of not being there. On October 20, Stone and her colleagues at Magee, who are in the middle of contract negotiations as a newly formed union, launched a campaign alongside working parents, advocates, and elected leaders to draft a countywide paid parental leave proposal for Allegheny County. They launched it on Mother's Day. On October 21, the Allegheny County Council voted 11 to 4 to pass it, creating the first county-level paid parental leave policy in the United States. Under the new law, both birthing and non-birthing parents receive 12 weeks of paid parental leave within the first year of childbirth, adoption, foster placement, or a stillbirth, with jobs and health benefits protected throughout. All businesses with 15 or more employees must offer the benefit.

The chamber was packed the night of the vote with supporters who spent hours testifying about their own experiences. A mother who experienced a stillbirth at 41 weeks said her husband took three weeks off to care for her with no paternity leave: you just don't know how you're going to survive another second, let alone trying to work. Council Vice President John Palmiere said he had doubted which way he would land on the issue but that the stories moved him. He voted yes. When the final tally was announced, the room broke into applause mixed with shouts of "thank you." Stone said the campaign had started with a public survey asking what would improve patient care and maternal health, and that the community wrote in in astonishing numbers requesting real paid parental leave across the board, even though the survey had not directly asked about it. The policy was scaled back from an original proposal of 18 weeks to 12 after pushback about the cost to employers, and small businesses with fewer than 15 employees are exempt. Stone described the moment as a potential inflection point and said she hoped it would be recognized someday as an early example of when things started to change. The United States remains the only industrialized nation without federal paid parental leave. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is now the first county in the country to pass one of its own. It started with a nurse in a NICU who kept dialing working parents at midday and starting every call the same way.

Source:https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/pittsburgh-nurses-12-week-paid-parental-leave