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. 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. 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. "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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Eventually, Brock's bosses offered her 12 weeks of unpaid leave -- the maximum amount provided under the Family and Medical Leave Act-- even though the federal law only covers firms with 50 or more workers and did not apply to Brock’s employer. “I really wanted to do the best I could do for him -- being there, bonding with him, being attentive to his needs, helping him develop in the best way possible.” 
 
 It was also a decision she didn’t think she’d have to make.
– 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.)