Increasing Trend of Paid Leave for Employees

Parental leave with pay is gradually on the rise. Recently a fast food chain in the U.S. has announced that their employees will have the benefit of 12 weeks of paid leaves under the circumstance and if the employee is eligible. The decision was based on the reason that it would cost less to give paid leaves rather than to train new employees to compensate for the absence. This is an unusually generous benefit for the employees in the U.S. Even though California has recently increased the duration of leave potentially up to 1 year combining the FMLA and the CFRA with additional company policy, they would not be paid during this time of absence.

The employer’s effort to help the employees balance their work and their family time has been on the rise, even though it is gradual. We have recently heard the news about the Virgin Group has also offered the employees to take longer absence from work and Canada has increased the number of maximum hours/days that the employees can take a time off to care for family matters. Currently, there are three states in the U.S. that allows the employees to apply for paid family leave that includes, foster care, adoption, serious illness of self or a family member they have to care for.

Initial response from the employers were some concerns that might hurt their business cycles and operations, however, like in California, New Jeresy and in Rhode Island, these paid family leave programs and other 18 states are considering is the employee’s funded leaves that the state government manage and the states pay to the employees. Which eliminates or minimizes the financial burden that the employers might have had. Like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, tech industries are competing in offering more generous benefits to the employees to find more talent to recruit to their company, similarly the recent case of the fast food restaurant is voluntarily offering to pay for the employee’s family welfare. We are expecting to find this to increase across industries in the business world.