This Is How Politics Is Supposed to Work
In Washington State, Democrats and Republicans worked together with unions and business owners to create a cutting-edge paid family leave system that works for everyone. How’d that happen?
Earlier this month, something remarkable happened. At the state house in Olympia on July 5th, Governor Jay Inslee signed a paid family leave bill into law. Unlike most of the legislation you hear about these days, this bill wasn’t crammed through a contentious process by one party or another. It was crafted through many hours of hard work by a truly bipartisan team of legislators, unions, and businesses. Every participant seems to have left the process happy, and the law will directly improve the lives of all Washington workers, no matter how much or how little they may earn.
In the current political climate, the story of how Washington’s new paid family leave law came to be sounds like a fairy tale. It’s a story that is inspirational and aspirational—one that doesn’t at all reflect the chaos we’re watching unfold in Washington DC every day.
I’m excited to tell this story to you, but first, let me explain what the law actually does.
Rebecca Johnson, the lead negotiator for the Washington Work and Family Coalition and United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 21 during the lawmaking process, doesn’t waste any words when she calls Washington’s new law “the best paid family and medical leave act in the country.” Only four other states — California, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island — and the District of Columbia have paid leave laws, but Johnson believes Washington’s is the most forward-thinking and will become the model for other states considering paid family leave.
What’s so special about the law? “It’s accessible, it’s affordable, it provides sufficient time off for families to really care for themselves or an ill family member,” Johnson explains. And perhaps most importantly, “through the process of negotiation we were able to create a system that works for businesses of all sizes.”
Once the systems have been established and the law goes into effect in 2020, workers will have 12 weeks per year available to care for themselves or a family member in case of sickness or injury, with a total of 16 weeks available for a combination of both. It also supplies an additional two weeks if the illness is a complication due to pregnancy. “It’s a significant amount of time,” Johnson says.
Also significant? This paid family leave is “an insurance system that lives at the state, so it’s different than something like the minimum wage or paid sick days — things that employers are responsible for providing for their workers.” Instead, you apply to and get wage replacement for your time off from the state, in much the same way that unemployment works.
Importantly, the law provides progressive wage replacement. “Low-wage workers will receive about 90 percent of their take-home pay,” Johnson says. “That’s significant because even in places like California, where there’s 52 weeks available, low-wage workers aren’t really able to use [the time] because [they’re only compensated with] 55 percent of their take-home pay,” which isn’t enough to survive. The weekly amount paid out increases based on salary until it tops off at $1000 per week.
The law compensates for the additional challenges faced by small employers. “The way we designed it is employers who have 50 or fewer employees don’t pay any premiums unless they want to have access to business incentives,” Johnson explains. If they do pay those premiums, “they get access to a $3000 grant if they hire somebody to replace a worker, or a $1000 grant if they’re shifting folks around” to cover overtime and retraining costs.
To qualify for paid sick leave, employees have to work in Washington state for 820 hours total. Many laws are still tied to the outdated idea of the stable, single-employer 40-hour workweek, but this law “reflects a workforce that shifts jobs a lot.” You could work those 820 hours for a single employer, or for one hour each at 820 different Washington state employers, and it would make no difference. Johnson says this is “reflective of our modern economy: those 820 hours can be worked for any employer in the state, so it’s completely portable.”
As a result, she says, “all workers in the state are covered.”
State Senator Karen Keiser, a Democrat from the 33rd District (encompassing much of Kent, Des Moines, and other south Sound neighborhoods) has been fighting for paid family leave for a decade and a half now. “My very first effort was getting the family care act passed in 2002,” she says. “That allowed people who had earned sick leave on the job to use the sick leave to care for sick family members.” It sounds unthinkable now, but before then, an employer could fire a worker for taking their own sick time to care for their child. “We got that passed with bipartisan support — we called it the chicken pox bill,” Keiser laughs.
From there, Keiser has worked steadily on issues that meet in the intersection between labor and family. “I’ve worked all my life,” she says. “I have a family, and like any working woman with a family, things happen. Life happens. You just understand how difficult it is when you’re working to make pieces fit without doing harm.”
When her daughter was about 18 months old, Keiser recalls, “she said she had a tummy-ache but it turned out her appendix exploded, and she ended up in care in Children’s Hospital.” Her daughter was in isolation for two and a half weeks and readmitted later for reinfection. Keiser, who was at the time pregnant, recalls the worry and the stress of caring for her family and her unborn child while also staying on top of work requirements.
Later, she had to care for her mother in the last year of her life. “She had three health events,” Keiser says: “she had breast cancer, she fell and broke her hip, and she came back with pancreatic cancer. I wanted to be with her, of course, and I was blessed to have a flexible job. But so many workers here do not.”
Keiser represents SeaTac, and many of her constituents work in the service industry. “I always envision the hotel maid who doesn’t have any benefits on the job. She’s changing beds and vacuuming and cleaning toilets and she’s got a family too.” After many years of work, Keiser has finally made it possible for that maid to care for her family and herself in the same way that she was able to look after her own family.
Keiser is proud of the law’s progressive benefit structure and its portability, but she’s especially proud of its universality: “There are no carve-outs,” she says. “It’s for all workers, not just some.”
When I ask about the divisiveness in American politics, Keiser pushes back gently. At least on the state level, she says, she’s found lots of bipartisan support during her two decades in the Senate. And with the paid family leave bill, she says “the person I worked with is someone I know pretty well because he’s in a neighboring district and we’ve shared many pieces of legislation.” Republican Senator Joe Fain from the 47th district (encompassing part of Kent, Auburn, and Covington) had already worked with Keiser earlier this year to improve the care of drug-affected babies, so it was a natural transition to work together on paid family leave.
She credits Fain with a part of the law that benefits small business. Originally, the plan was to offer a business and occupation (B&O) tax credit to small businesses who participated in the paid family leave program. Fain talked to businesses and came back with a different plan. “It was helpful to understand that a tax credit for small business was useless, because a tax credit is paid out a year later,” Keiser says.
So at Fain’s behest, they started to think about different—and more immediate—approaches. “Instead of a B&O tax credit as one of the incentives for small business, we developed a training benefit.” Keiser still sounds impressed by this “practical” addition to the law, which she says “makes total sense.” “It helps develop your workforce,” she says, calling it “a total win-win situation.”
Like Senator Keiser, Senator Fain had a personal motivation to make the paid family leave bill as strong as possible. When his son was born in April of last year, he suddenly understood how much time and attention a newborn requires. “The whole issue kind of becomes real to you,” Fain says. “Things that are theoretical can still be impactful, but when you’re the one changing a diaper and rocking a screaming baby back and forth at three in the morning, the policy takes on a whole different kind of life.”
Though Fain admits that “my wife and I have a really great situation, we face the same challenges every new parent faces, which is not enough time and not enough hands. Given the privilege that we have to be home with him in those formative months — it just sort of hits home.” He worked on the bill with “those families that are back at work two weeks later — or the very next day, as the case may be” at the forefront of his mind.
In the end, he says, “I’m really proud of the disparate interest groups that came together to forge a compromise, especially in a political climate that oftentimes thumbs its’ nose at compromise and sometimes cares too much about exerting power.” He says the process took “hundreds of hours” of “sitting in a room and talking back and forth, responding in a meaningful way with no gamesmanship and no strong-arm tactics.” He credits all involved parties — Democrats and Republicans, yes, but also business, labor, and social services — for contributing “honest ideas and concerns and collective problem solving.”
For his part, Fain is proudest of the work he did to advocate for small business. With the new law, “training a new employee isn’t going to trigger a big hit on [small business owners’] unemployment numbers.” And by exempting smaller companies from paying the premiums, he believes the law helps level the playing field between large corporations and neighborhood businesses.
Fain has nothing but praise for Keiser’s role in the process, calling her “an unstoppable force on this issue.” When told about her praise for his small-business component, Fain is quick to share the credit. “Senator Keiser was particularly a proponent of the progressive wage replacement to help low-income workers. And the way she explained why that was important really resonated with the folks on our side of the table.”
Have they learned anything from the process that they’re going to apply in the future? “I think there was incredible value in not rushing the process, but instead trying to really listen,” Fain says. He likes that all concerned parties were willing to “maybe walk down paths that don’t lead anywhere” in search of solutions, because it allowed them to apply new thinking to the policy. “We built a lot of trust in that room,” Fain says. “I hope we can continue to build on that — particularly in the relationship between business and labor.”
Keiser agrees. “I did learn quite a bit about the value of good faith negotiations and the standard of trust and integrity that we had at the table. That was pretty rare, I have to tell you. I’ve been at many tables and this one was well-managed. I have to give all parties credit,” she says. Even though “we had some tough meetings and some testy times,” ultimately “we retained our integrity and our good faith and worked through it.”
This kind of cooperation is a great sign, but all the high-minded talk doesn’t mean anything if the law doesn’t improve the lives of everyday Washingtonians. To examine what kind of impacts it would have for workers, I spoke with Karina Romero, who has been a sales associate at Macy’s for seven years.
In December of last year, Romero’s seven-year-old son Dylan became ill with a rare condition called Kawasaki disease which inflames arteries throughout the body. If not treated properly, it could have long-lasting detrimental effects. Dylan was in the hospital for two weeks, including Christmas day.
Romero calls December “my money-making month,” and she had to scramble to find other employees who were willing to pick up her shifts during the busiest time of the year. Romero admits that “two weeks without pay is hard financially on me.”
She fell behind on her rent. “I’m lucky to have a landlord that was understanding and allowed me to pay in increments to catch up,” Romero said in a speech at the bill signing. “Your child being in the hospital with a very serious illness is one of the most terrifying and stressful situations that can happen. Whether you have the money to keep a roof over your head and food on the table is the last thing you want to worry about.”
Still: she never hesitated. “Mothers can’t go to work when a child is ill” the way Dylan was, Romero says. She’s pleased to report that Dylan is “doing well” now. “He’s still taking his daily dose of aspirin every day,” as prescribed. But she can’t forget about how scared she was when he was hospitalized for weeks, and how hard it was to explain to her other child—Dylan’s twin—that Christmas might not be so merry because the future was uncertain.
The experience taught Romero that “we never know what can happen in life.” If the same situation had occurred under the protection of the paid family leave law, she tells me, “we would be prepared for a situation like that.” That security would have allowed her to be more fully present when her children needed her most.
But we’ve been trained through years of partisan brinksmanship to believe that what’s good for workers is bad for businesses. I talked with Hannah Carter, owner of Ballard barbecue restaurant Bitterroot and Montlake sandwich shop Mammoth, in her capacity as a board member of the Seattle Restaurant Alliance to find out if that’s true with paid family leave.
Carter says she’s “happy to be in a state that is making [paid family leave] a priority,” and that she wishes it was a federal law. But aren’t regulations burdensome for businesses? On the contrary, Carter says, “our industry in particular tends not to have a lot of insurance available and not have a lot of access to that leave.” But the new law allows owners to “support our staff” in a way that keeps the bottom line in mind.
When the talks about leave were happening, Carter and the Seattle Restaurant Alliance was “concerned” that small businesses like restaurants “don’t have the staffing to absorb that kind of time off.” She’s impressed that the legislators and unions “took into consideration the personal issues” that small business owners brought to the talks. “I would definitely say I feel heard.”
Carter thinks the law is “incredibly beneficial in our industry — people who employ at a low-wage level. We’re most affected by this law, and it gives our employees opportunities they don’t currently have.” While previously she had to stitch together quick fixes on a case-by-case basis, the law “ gives us as business owners a real solution to an occurrence that happens in our people’s lives. Now we have a clear path in how to handle it.”
For Carter’s businesses, “most of our employees are full time.” This provides the restaurants with a solid and experienced worker base, but it also leaves a huge gap in schedules and duties when a worker has to take time off. She’s impressed that under the new law, “when we hire a temporary worker, our unemployment will not be affected and the temp workers will still be able to access unemployment” after their temporary stint is over. Additionally, those temp workers could eventually be hired back if a position on staff opens up, providing business owners with a pool of experienced workers to consider when expanding their operations.
In the end, Carter says, the law came to be because everyone found common ground. While not every problem has a solution that can be reached through a coalition like this, “I do think that families and communities should be a bipartisan issue.”
“We all want this. It’s good for everybody,” she concludes.
