Policies that provide paid time off to care for family members or recover from a serious medical event offer a host of benefits to workers; their newborn, newly adopted, or fostered children; and the ill spouses, aging parents, or military family members for whom they care.
But can paid family and medical leave be good for businesses, too? Compelling new evidence suggests that it can, and now is an ideal time for Indiana to craft paid family and medical leave legislation that will enable employees to access these benefits without overburdening their employers.
This publication will:
• outline the case for paid family and medical leave, including the potential benefits of expanded access
to paid leave for Hoosier families, businesses and the economy
• describe what is currently available in Indiana and in other states
• make recommendations for state policy
Publication
Implementation of the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act (WIOA) is well underway. This process creates unprecedented opportunity to adopt policies and practices that boost job quality. Connecting workers with the best quality job possible serves job seekers better. More stable work means higher income, longer job tenure, and better predictability for managing the tensions between work and life. But beyond that, WIOA policies for job quality help protect public investments in training by ensuring that those investments are not simply lost in a revolving door of turnover. Policies that focus on better quality jobs help make WIOA resources a reward for employers who are already treating their workers with greater care, rather than subsidizing low-road competitors who may waste the investment. A new report produced by COWS, the Keystone Research Center in Pennsylvania, and Policy Matters Ohio, identifies three WIOA quality standards that can target public training investment where it will have stronger returns.
Working full time, year round is not enough to guarantee a middle-class standard of living. Nearly one in five working Iowa families, in fact, does not earn enough to meet basic needs. There are a number of things that could be done to help such families move into the middle class. Policies are needed to improve both the demand-side and the supply-side of the labor market. On the demand side, we need more middle-class jobs with decent wages and benefits. On the supply side, we need more workers with the education and skills needed to qualify for most good-paying jobs.
What we focus on here, however, is a set of policies called work supports that help low-wage working families survive and keep their children out of poverty, and that provide a stepping stone to a better education and a better job. We lay out a set of policies to strengthen these pathways to the middle class:
• Reform Iowa’s Child Care Assistance program to eliminate a huge disincentive called the cliff and to make it more effective as a help to parents trying to improve their skills and raise their wage level.
• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to provide even stronger support to low-wage workers, encourage more work effort, and keep children out of poverty.
• Expand the Child and Dependent Care Credit to cushion the loss of Child Care Assistance.
These reforms should be combined with education policies that ensure future generations of Iowans receive a quality and affordable education, from preschool through post-secondary institutions. This will require expansion of the universal preschool program, support of K-12 education through adequate funding of state foundation aid, and continued efforts to make post-secondary education more affordable by restraining tuition growth.