Would Corporations Also Like Safe Spaces?
By 
During the 2016 presidential campaign, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton pledged their support for more paid family leave. Now big business is countering the calls with a proposal of its own: Congress should establish a certain optional amount of paid leave and, if companies meet that threshold, they should be protected from state or local laws that might require more.
The proposal is part of a report being released Tuesday by the HR Policy Association, a coalition of more than 380 major U.S. companies. Together, the group’s members employ 9 percent of America’s private-sector workers. Executives on the committee behind the report represent companies including Marriott International, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Cigna, General Electric, Wendy’s, Oracle and General Mills.
The preemptive strike from the business community is also a response to the increasing number of states and municipalities that have taken matters into their own hands, passing local laws that require employers to offer paid time off.
You can see why they are freaking out. Those states and cities are so onerous and mean to our betters!
As of now, federal law offers many employees the opportunity to take unpaid family leave, but doesn’t require employers to give workers paid time off for sickness or childcare, including maternity leave. Since 2011, seven states and dozens of cities have passed laws requiring companies to provide paid sick days. Another two states and the District of Columbia passed laws creating family leave funds and requiring companies to let their employees use them.
In places like California, Arizona, New York City and Minneapolis, new laws let employees accrue at least one hour of sick time for every 30 hours of work, or roughly one sick day for every six weeks of full-time work. Nationally about 61 percent of private-sector workers have access to some form of paid sick days, according to 2015 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Twelve percent have some form of paid family leave.
One sick day every six weeks! What’s next, the slaughtered first born of every CEO? No wonder corporations need special government interference. The free market indeed.