Labor Law Center Blog » Blog Archive » New York Family Leave Law Leaving?

New York Family Leave Law Leaving?

June 10th, 2007 Posted by Mark

According to my sources, it appears as if the family leave law that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was hoping to pass might not come to pass. It would have given employees the right to take off family leave time, paid, to care for a new baby or for a sick family member. The plan would have given workers as many as 12 weeks off to do so, at a weekly benefit rate of as much as $170 per week.

The reason that the bill will not be successful most likely, according to some, is that the Republicans who dominate the Senate in the state do not want to move to pass the bill this session, which will end in a couple weeks on June 21. One of the reason for this is the fact the Senators have a different idea of how the family leave law should be, versus what the governor wants to pass.

At the moment, there are only two states that have such family leave laws on the books—the first one being Washington state and the other one being California. What would make the New York program different than those two, in the view of the plan from Spitzer, would be that the New York family leave benefits would be paid for by the workers themselves.

In California, on the other hand, workers can take off only six weeks for family leave, but they can get as much as $882 per week as the benefit.

The workers would pay as much as 45 cents per week in a form of tax that would come right out of their pay rolls. That would be on top of the 65 cents per week that the New York employees already pay to fund the state temporary disability insurance system.

One of the reasons that businesses do not appreciate the governor’s family leave program, even though they would not have to pay for it, is that they feel the family leave law would become a burden on employers in New York nonetheless. After all, they say, it would be employers who would have to find temporary workers to replace those out on family leave, as well as train and retrain new workers each time an existing employees goes out to care for a sick relative or take care of their baby.

At first, it seemed as if the governor might have been able to get his plan in place before the end of this session in Albany. That was because the New York state Assembly is controlled by Democrats, unlike the Senate, and the governor had their support for his family leave law. These Democrats have in fact not completely given up on the idea, and they had meetings last week to continue to discuss ways to get the family leave law passed this legislative session in the Empire State.

The way the current system in New York works is the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, for which we all have our FMLA poster, of Family and Medical Leave Act poster, on our walls. That system works by allowing employees to take up to as much as six to 12 weeks off from work for family medical emergencies, new born children, adopted children, or their own personal illness or crisis. But under the Family and Medical Leave Act on the federal level, workers do not paid for their time off. That might work for some workers with money saved in the bank, say supporters of the new laws, but many workers cannot afford to take off work and not get paid for it.