Senate Democrats challenged President Trump to live up to his campaign promise to provide a plan to expand paid family and sick leave for all Americans, saying his proposal that would only offer paid maternity leave for women is a “non-starter” in the Senate.
“Trump ran on a paid leave that was entirely unacceptable – it was not gender neutral and it would not actually deal with the problem,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told reporters Tuesday.
The Trump plan, she said, is focused solely on providing six weeks of paid maternity leave for women and does not allow women and men to take time off work time for any family emergency, whether it’s a sick spouse, a death in the family or a new baby.
“It has to be gender-neutral,” she said. “You’re going to continue to marginalize women’s ability to make money in the first place … so that is a non-starter in the Senate.”
The Gillibrand measure would provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave for workers for certain types of family emergencies by creating a national program and a shared fund paid for by employee and employer payroll contributions, which she said amounts to less than $2 a week each for each typical worker.
The bill would enable workers to earn 66 percent of their monthly wages up to a capped amount and ensures that low- and middle-wage workers have a higher share of their salaries replaced.
“This is the same as a cup of coffee a week to have a national paid leave plan in place,” she said.
Gillibrand was joined by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.
Klobuchar told the story of her own experience several years ago with the birth of her daughter who was born with a stomach disorder that required her to use a feeding tube and be fed milk every hour.
“We didn’t know if she would make it,” Klobuchar said, noting that the law firm where she worked provided for six weeks paid leave and another six weeks unpaid leave.
Duckworth, a former Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her aircraft, said the issue is “deeply personal” to me.
When she recovering at Walter Reed, her husband, who was a civilian contractor at the Department of Defense, got 12 weeks of unpaid leave to help her recover and spend time at her bedside.
When he returned to his job, however, the Pentagon ended his contract.
All the senators argued that the United States is the only industrialized nation that does not require employers to provide paid leave to its workers for the birth of the child, time to care for a sick spouse or dealing with a death in the family.
