Labor Law Center Blog » Blog Archive » Prepare for Washington Paid Leave (Cont.)

Prepare for Washington Paid Leave (Cont.)

April 24th, 2007 Posted by Mark

The Washington state law, when it is signed in effect into law in the next few days probably, will provide workers in the state with paid five weeks off for child care. However, this is not a precedent at all on the state level. As we saw the last few days when I talked about mandatory family leave and other forms of paid or unpaid time off—what do you mean, you don’t remember me talking about these things? Didn’t you read my blog over the weekend? You don’t work over the weekend? For shame on you!

Kidding aside, instead of forcing you to go back and scour my blog posts from last week, I will give you a quick review of what we talked about—past precedents in the paid leave minimum time off movement. The big law came about in California, back in 2002, which is technically the first such law in the whole country.

It required that employers in the state give their employees at least six weeks of paid time off whenever they needed it for family and or medical reasons, such as if they themselves got sick or had a new baby, or if they needed to care for a sick child or a sick elderly parent. The time off could also be used to care for a registered domestic partner, or more traditionally, for their spouse if they were sick. As with the Washington law, this paid time off could be used right after an adoption, too, to bond with the new child in the family.

The California law pays out more per week, too, than the proposed Washington law. Whereas the Washington law only offers out a minimum of $250 per week, the existing California law entitles workers on this paid leave as much as $882 per week, with benefits. And California requires the Family Rights Act Notice posters as well.