D.C. could have the best family leave benefits in the country if the city's council adopts a plan that would grant District residents and workers 16 weeks of paid leave. (WUSA 9) 
 
 D.C. could have the best family leave benefits in the country if the city's council adopts a plan that would grant District residents and workers 16 weeks of paid leave. (WUSA 9) 
 
 The District would become the most generous place in the country for a worker to take time off after giving birth or to care for a dying parent under a measure supported by a majority of the D.C. Council. 
 
 Under the legislation that will be introduced Tuesday, almost every part-time and full-time employee in the nation’s capital would be entitled to 16 weeks of paid family leave to bond with an infant or an adopted child, recover from an illness, recuperate from a military deployment or tend to an ill family member. 
 
 The broad new worker benefit, enthusiastically supported by the Obama administration, would be paid from a fund created by a new tax on D.C. employers. The benefit would dwarf family-leave assistance in all 50 states and would also mark a step toward benefits offered by most European countries, where parents can take as much as a year of paid time off following the birth of a child. 
 
 The measure also could soon mark a rare legislative victory in Washington for President Obama — not on Capitol Hill, but down Pennsylvania Avenue inside city hall. 
 
 The administration has spent years watching its ideas to address rising income inequality fall flat in Congress amid partisan gridlock. The proposed measure amounts to a new strategy in executive branch workarounds: using local law to forge a policy bulkhead for bigger changes nationally. Supporters said the bill would help to address the widening gap between rich and poor by helping families take time off when they otherwise couldn’t make ends meet. 
 
 D.C. Council member Elissa Silverman said paid family leave would make the District more competitive regionally by making it easier for women to reenter the workforce. “There is a big problem with keeping women in the workplace and making it feel like you can come back.” (Bill O'Leary/THE WASHINGTON POST) 
 
 “The Obama administration has realized the action is on the state and local level, and they gave us the money to model how this could actually work,” said D.C. Council member Elissa Silverman (I-At Large), one of the lead supporters of the measure. “We now have a national platform and a great opportunity with this legislation to show how it can be done.” 
 
 The measure is the first major legislative product to flow from a grant program that U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez has openly advertised as an end run on a Republican-controlled Congress, which, when it comes to worker compensation, has declined to take up the issue of a stagnated federal minimum wage. 
 
 [Perez, White House begin road show to build support for family leave] 
 
 “The United States is one of the few countries on Earth without national paid leave. Fortunately, we have seen remarkable progress . . . where innovative state and local officials are designing paid-leave policies that work for their citizens,” Perez said last week in a statement. 
 
 The D.C. Chamber of Commerce on Monday pushed back against the proposal, saying in a letter to the council that the business community has not been privy to the Department of Labor-funded research used to develop the legislation. The group warned that an entirely employer-funded family-leave program “would be unprecedented and make the District of Columbia dangerously uncompetitive.” 
 
 But an increasingly liberal D.C. Council has pushed the issue to the forefront and with greater force than even some Obama administration officials expected. 
 
 The D.C. legislation would more than double the length of any paid-leave program in the country. Only three states have enacted such laws over the past 10 years. Currently, the maximum benefit is six weeks of partial paid leave in New Jersey and California. 
 
 The District would offer 16 weeks and unprecedented coverage for workers’ salaries and hourly wages: 100 percent of pay for those making up to $52,000 a year. 
 
 Employees who earn more than that would be eligible for $1,000 a week plus 50 percent of their additional income, up to a maximum of $3,000 per week. 
 
 Almost all D.C. employees would be eligible. The only ones excluded would be residents of Maryland and Virginia who work for the federal government, because the city could not compel it to participate. District employees of the federal government and federal contractors could opt into the system and pay a small fee to participate. 
 
 [Poll: Do you support the D.C. paid family leave proposal?] 
 
 The plan would be paid for with a first-of-its-kind new levy on D.C. employers, akin to a state unemployment insurance pool. 
 
 Every D.C. employer would be required to pay into the fund on a sliding scale. Law firms, lobbying groups and others with the District’s highest-paid workers would pay the equivalent of 1 percent of the salaries of employees who earn above $150,000, or about $1,500 annually per worker. 
 
 On the low end, employers of minimum wage workers, who now earn $10.50 per hour, would have to contribute 0.6 percent of each worker’s pay, or about $131 per employee per year. 
 
 “It’s a very cost-effective program, it doesn’t require a lot of money to provide a whole lot of benefit,” said Jeffrey Hayes, study director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the D.C. nonprofit organization that the District hired with its $96,000 Labor Department grant to model the plan. 
 
 Hayes used a series of sophisticated simulations to help determine how the District could afford to offer paid family leave for nearly all workers — full-time and part-time, and especially low­income workers. 
 
 Silverman and council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who pushed the measure for months behind the scenes, recently attended a symposium led by the Labor Department where the District’s efforts were lauded for helping to “push the needle” on family-leave law. 
 
 At the symposium, Perez announced the Obama administration would triple its grants for similar work, to a total of $2 million. It is behind efforts in 12 states and local governments nationwide to spur family leave laws. 
 
 Grosso last month took the plan before dozens of members of the local Chamber of Commerce and argued that it would make D.C. employers more competitive regionally because it would create loyalty to the District, compared with Maryland and Virginia, which have no statewide paid-family-leave programs. A handful of businesses have signed on in support, while others have said the plan would create burdens on companies to find temporary help if the paid leave entices more employees to utilize family leave already allowed under federal law. 
 
 But Grosso’s pitch to colleagues has primarily been focused on the bill as a partial solution to growing wage disparities. He has argued that family leave should not become the domain of the wealthy. 
 
 “The fact of the matter is, if you’re making less than $1,000 a week, you can’t make ends meet on a fraction of your pay. You can’t afford to take that leave,” said Grosso, chairman of the council’s education committee. 
 
 He pointed to research that men who care for their children as infants are more likely to be a bigger part of their kids’ lives later on. 
 
 “In this country, we really don’t reward strong families the way we should,” Grosso said. Like most other council sponsors of the bill, he does not have any children but said he and his mother had to stagger shifts years ago to care for a terminally ill grandmother. ||||| Christian Glatz: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24092454@N00/12582433/ 
 
 During his State of the Union speech in January, President Barack Obama lamented that millions of Americans do not have paid sick and parental leave. "And that forces too many parents to make the gut-wrenching choice between a paycheck and a sick kid at home," he said at the time. 
 
 His words haven't prompted Congress to adopt any nationwide policies, but a pair of legislators and a coalition of advocacy groups are hoping to do away with that "gut-wrenching choice" in the nation's capital. 
 
 D.C. Council members Elissa Silverman and David Grosso — independents who hold at-large seats — on Tuesday introduced the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015, under which all D.C. residents and workers would be eligible for 16 weeks of paid leave for medical or family reasons, including the birth, adoption or fostering of a child. 
 
 "Almost every country in the world has paid family leave except for the United States, and I think it's time that we rectify that," says Silverman, a first-term Council member who has identified with progressive causes like raising the minimum wage. 
 
 If passed, the bill would offer D.C. workers the most generous paid leave in the country. 
 
 Paid leave for all 
 
 Who Would Qualify? Any employee — whether or not they live in D.C. — of a private business, organization or company based in D.C. 
 
 
 
 Employees of the federal government who live in D.C., or D.C. residents who work outside the city, could opt into the system by paying their own contributions to a city-managed leave fund. 
 
 
 
 Maryland and Virginia residents who work for the federal government in D.C. would not be eligible. 
 
 Last year, the D.C. government adopted a new policy granting city employees up to eight weeks of paid sick and family leave. In January, Obama issued an executive order allowing federal employees to take up to six weeks of paid leave after the birth of a child, and last month he ordered that federal contractors give workers up to seven days of paid leave. 
 
 And though D.C. law allows employees to take up to 16 weeks of leave after having a child and not lose their job, it does not require that the leave be paid. And for those employers that do offer paid leave, it is often under the guide of short- and long-term disability plans, which means that the amount paid can be less than an employee's usual salary. 
 
 But under Silverman and Grosso's bill, almost all D.C. workers holding full- and part-time jobs would be eligible for paid leave for family or medical reasons. 
 
 The measure would work much like unemployment insurance. Private employers would pay into a new Family and Medical Leave Fund, while federal government workers who live in D.C., along with residents who work outside the city, would make personal contributions to the fund. 
 
 Contributions would vary by salary; 1 percent for every employee making over $150,000 per year, 0.8 percent for those in the $50,000-150,000 range, and so on down. Self-employed residents would be allowed to opt out. 
 
 An employee taking leave would file a claim with the fund, which would pay out the benefits. Under the bill, the fund would cover 100 percent of the first $1,000 an employee makers per week and 50 percent thereafter, for a maximum of $3,000 per week over the course of the leave taken. 
 
 Mothers and children attended Tuesday's D.C. Council session, where a paid leave bill was introduced. (WAMU/Martin Austermuhle) 
 
 In 2014, D.C. received a $96,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to study options for expanding paid leave. Silverman says that the bill being introduced Tuesday draws from some of the research done for that study, as well as conversations her staff had with officials in California, New Jersey and Rhode Island — the three states that currently have paid leave policies on the books, albeit none approaching the amount of time being considered in the D.C. bill. 
 
 Advocates say they do not yet have know how much the bill would cost employers, but that an estimate will be produced by the Office D.C. Chief Financial Officer as the measure moves its way through the Council. 
 
 Silverman says she recognizes that the bill will have a cost to both employers and employees working outside D.C., but that only with a universal approach will the measure succeed. 
 
 "There is a cost, but just like why we have a health insurance exchange, which then pools risk and lowers the cost for everyone, paid family leave takes the same approach," she says. 
 
 Advocates say that while the bill will benefit all D.C.-based employees, it's most important for low-income workers. 
 
 "I can't tell you how many times I've sat in front of a worker who is pregnant, and in what should be a joyful time is sitting in front of me crying and saying she won't have an income anymore as soon as her baby comes into the world," says Sheena Wadhawan, advocacy director at the D.C. Employment Justice Center, one of the dozens of organizations backing the bills. 
 
 "This bill is important because workers should be able to have a child, should be able to care for their families without it turning into the worst moment in their lives when they lose their income and are forced to choose between caring for their children and being able to pay their rent," she adds. 
 
 Concerns from business community 
 
 But as with many measures that have emanated from the Council, some sectors of the business community are concerned with the costs of providing paid leave — and say those costs could force businesses to relocate to outside the city. 
 
 "While the business community definitely wants happy employees, our concern is that there are some issues that haven't been addressed, some of the details, and we're worried that this could affect the business climate in Washington, D.C.," says Harry Wingo, president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. 
 
 Wingo says he was initially consulted when the bill was being drafted, but that the chamber will not support the version of the bill being introduced. 
 
 "Our concern is that this would go further than any other type of legislation in the nation, in a bad way. The burden would be completely on employers, so this would be employer funded, and in fact employees would not be contributing as they do in other systems," he says. 
 
 Grosso says that contributions to the fund fall exclusively on employers because the city's charter prohibits it from imposing a tax on non-residents. And even though the cost will fall on employers, Silverman says those same employers would benefit from having happier employees. 
 
 "I understand the chamber's concerns, but study after study show that workers who feel like their employer care about them end up being more productive workers, and that benefits employers," she says. 
 
 That's what Jamie Davis-Smith, who attended the Tuesday Council session with her 10-month-old son in tow, said about the six weeks paid leave her husband was given by his employer. 
 
 "I know that for families such as my own that have been lucky enough to experience even a short period of paid leave, it really results in a great appreciation to your employer and promotes a lot of loyalty to your employer," she says. 
 
 Advocates also say that the business community similarly complained about other measures passed by the Council, including a 2008 bill requiring that all employers give employees paid sick leave. In May, the D.C. Auditor published a report saying that that law — which was expanded in 2014 to include tipped workers — had "minimal impact on employers." 
 
 Grosso says the bill would move D.C. closer to what is considered a standard benefit for families in many other countries. 
 
 "In other countries, this is the norm. And this is how it is done, and it is supported because they believe in strong families in other countries better than we do here," he says. 
 
 The bill has been assigned to a Council committee for a hearing and markup, after which it would go to the full Council for voting. Two separate votes are required for any legislation to pass, after which it is sent to the mayor for consideration. 
 
 According to Grosso's office, the bill is being co-sponsored by Council members Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1), LaRuby May (D-Ward 8), Anita Bonds (D-At Large), Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5), and Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) — giving it enough votes to pass the Council. ||||| Speaking in Aston, Pa., Sept. 13, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rolled out his child-care policy as his daughter Ivanka stood by his side. (The Washington Post) 
 
 Donald Trump released Tuesday a paid maternity leave plan — the first from a Republican presidential nominee. The measure, a pillar of the real estate mogul’s child-care proposal, bears close resemblance to an idea floated by Bill Clinton in 1999. 
 
 Trump’s plan would guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave to women; currently, federal policy provides only 12 weeks of unpaid time off. He would fund the change by tweaking the unemployment insurance employers must provide under federal law, according to the campaign. 
 
 The country’s Federal-State Unemployment Insurance supplies benefits to workers who lose their job through no fault of their own. What that means varies by state, but the state-run program generally covers workers who are laid off. Trump’s proposal would open the aid to new mothers, who often miss wages as life’s expenses surge. Employers would not absorb the burden, Trump aides said, because reductions in the existing program would offset the cost. 
 
 Advocates for working families in the late 1990s called a version of this concept baby unemployment insurance, or “Baby UI.” The first iteration emerged in Vermont, where policymakers saw the legislation as a way to boost working mothers, the breadwinners in a growing number of American households. It never passed, but Vermont legislators sought the federal Labor Department's approval in hopes the model would spread nationwide. 
 
 At the time, Clinton told former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman to draft regulations allowing states to grant unemployment insurance benefits to new parents. The Labor Department’s resulting Baby UI plan, released in 2000, allowed states to fund both maternity and paternity leave for 12 weeks. By 2003, however, the movement chilled. The Bush administration rescinded the policy, insisting it would hurt employers, stifle business and put women at risk of employment discrimination. 
 
 Trump’s spin on Baby UI would be cheaper than the design Clinton backed. Mothers would be eligible for the new safety-net if their workplace lacked the benefit. Fathers, however, would not qualify. The program would cover half the time Democrats fought for 17 years ago — six weeks instead of 12. Trump said he would eliminate fraud within the program to keep the cost down, the Post's Robert Costa reported, though the Trump campaign did not specify how that would work. 
 
 On Tuesday, Trump aides addressed the long-held conservative concerns about using unemployment insurance to fund maternity leave. In a campaign memo shared with The Post, they said women who intend to have children would not become “less desirable” to employers. The program reductions would pay for the change without raising taxes, staffers said, so hiring a potential mother would not add to a business’s costs. 
 
 Economist Heidi Hartmann, president of the nonpartisan Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said the plan would still single out women by extending guaranteed paid leave to only one gender. But she welcomes the conversation, which she said was previously silent on the right. 
 
 “It’s great that a Republican candidate for president is indicating support for paid maternity leave,” Hartman said. “It’s also interesting that Trump is proposing half of Bill Clinton’s idea from the year 2000.” 
 
 Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., said Trump’s plan isn’t free — it’s a government program expansion, dressed up to look fiscally conservative. 
 
 “Someone’s going to pay that cost,” he said. “Arguably it’s the employer. The reality is the costs are always passed on to the employee in one way or another. Ultimately, you'll have men or women who don't have children paying for women who do.” 
 
 That could mean lost vacation time, Tanner said, or lower wages. 
 
 Hillary Clinton has proposed 12 weeks of paid family leave funded through tax increases on the wealthy. Trump first mentioned the plight of working families last month in a Detroit speech on the economy, pledging to make childcare tax-free. Both his eldest daughter, 34-year-old Ivanka Trump, and campaign manager, veteran Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, have urged him to roll out policy ideas that support working mothers. 
 
 Advocates generally applaud Trump’s focus on working family issues — with caveats. 
 
 “It's great to see candidates addressing the need for paid leave, given that the U.S. is at the very bottom of the world's nations when it comes to affordable time to care,” Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work, said in a statement. “But we need to remember that it's not just pregnant women who welcome new children. Fathers and adoptive parents need time as well.” 
 
 More on Wonkblog: 
 
 Inside Donald Trump's strategy to win over women 
 
 
 
 Ivanka Trump's clothing designer does not offer paid maternity leave 
 
 
 
 What Donald Trump doesn't understand about calling women beautiful
– Washington, DC, could be about to leave the rest of the US behind and move a lot closer to Europe, at least as far as family leave is concerned. The DC Council backs legislation, to be introduced Tuesday, that would give workers 16 weeks of paid leave for events like the birth or adoption of a child, the terminal illness of a parent, or recovery from a military deployment, reports the Washington Post. The paper notes that the plan applies to almost all workers in the city (including part-time) and is more than double anything on offer in any of the 50 states. It will cover 100% of pay for people making $52,000 a year or less; the maximum weekly pay for the highest earners would be $3,000 per week. The new Family and Medical Leave Fund would be funded by a levy on employers that the Post likens to a state unemployment insurance fund, with employers paying in on a sliding scale that goes up to 1% of salaries for the highest-paid workers. WAMU reports the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015 has the votes to pass the Council; the legislation would then go to the mayor. The DC plan is a big victory for President Obama's push to boost family leave. Instead of trying to get legislation through Congress, the administration is offering grants to help create state-level paid family leave plans. The administration "has realized the action is on the state and local level, and they gave us the money to model how this could actually work," DC Council member Elissa Silverman tells the Post. "We now have a national platform and a great opportunity with this legislation to show how it can be done." The US is one of the only countries in the world without paid maternal leave, and experts say that has caused a lower rate of female participation in the labor force, reports the International Business Times. (This tech firm offers mothers and fathers a year's paid leave.)