House Democrats want to remove exemptions in the Paid Family Medical Leave Act and are eyeing a potential next coronavirus economic relief package to do so.
“We want to eliminate a lot of the exceptions for employers that don’t have to comply when they added all the exceptions — employers [of] over 500 and a lot of other people were exempted,” Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, said in a Monday conference call with reporters.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has described technical language she would like to see changed, related to caregivers of older family members subjected to the coronavirus.
The second and third coronavirus packages Congress and President Trump enacted inserted changes to Paid Family and Medical Leave to broaden the types of employees who can claim the benefit. But analysts noted some of the businesses these employees work for might not be able to sustain themselves by being mandated to provide these benefits.
“I think the average business can only operate for a couple of weeks without having the money coming in,” Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “To require them to pay workers who weren’t actually there producing anything was going to be really problematic, especially as this applied to anybody who has a child at home from school or day care.”
