In response to more than 1,400 public comments and especially the comments of more than 400 business leaders, the Allegheny County Health Department has made several key changes to its proposal to require paid parental leave.
The department would reduce the length of the leave from 18 weeks to 12 weeks, provide exemptions for businesses with fewer than 15 employees, and increase the amount of time an employee must work with a company before being eligible from 30 days to 180 days.
“Through all of the comments we tried to find a happy medium,” said Kim Joyce, the chief operation officer for the Health Department.
Pittsburgh’s Public Source reviewed and analyzed the comments, which ran around two-to-one in favor of paid parental leave, but also included many calls for amendments.
Although the revisions would leave out some employees, the department said the changes make the policy more consistent with other policies. The 12-week period is now aligned with the length of leave offered by most states that have a policy. And department staff noted that providing exceptions for small businesses aligns with the county’s proposed sick leave policy.
The revised policy would set a maximum payout of $4,200 per week for employees who earn $218,400 or more. And the proposal now offers businesses up to a year before they would be required to comply with the new policy – an increase from 180 days in the previous draft.
The new proposal did add parental leave benefits for parents who suffer stillbirth, a benefit that wasn’t provided in the initial draft but was brought up by several commenters.
The Board of Health announced that the public will have one additional chance to comment on the policy, at the beginning of a special Sept. 28 meeting to vote on the proposal. If passed by the board, it would then move to County Council where it would have to work its way through a subcommittee before a vote by the entire council. But the council won’t be able to make any additional changes.
“I don’t think there is any question that having paid parental leave is a helpful thing for parents and families in the county,” said Joylette Portlock, the board chair. “We will be considering and digesting and revisiting this on September 28th.”
Enforcement and legal challenges
The board did not vote on the new policy Wednesday but members asked questions around the details of enforcement and whether it would stand up to legal scrutiny.
Employees who think their employer is unfairly excluding them from parental leave would be able to appeal to the county, which could then issue fines of up to $100 per violation per day. If a company is violating multiple provisions of the policy, the fines could increase by $100 each day for each violation, according to Joyce.
Board members raised questions about whether parents who are not involved in their children’s lives can also take leave. The department solicitor said a business could determine not to provide leave to an employee who was not using it to care for their child but was instead using it to go on vacation. The solicitor said this would not apply to reasonable breaks for the parents, like going on a date or going to see a movie.
Portlock, who previously ran the nonprofit Sustainable Pittsburgh, asked whether nonprofits will have enough time to fundraise to pay for the new requirements before they take effect.
One board member, Graham Snyder, asked whether some of the commenters who threatened to sue the Health Department over the new policy could succeed in their lawsuits.
Jason Willis, the senior solicitor at the Health Department, noted that the county has faced opposition from a number of groups and industries in the past but that the overall authority of the department to act should be upheld in court. As long as the department is following the law and “trying to protect the public and that is our guiding star”, he said, they should be able to successfully defend against any litigation.
The new policy draft also includes language to address several worries from commenters about special situations or types of employees.
- Part-time employees would be paid at their current hourly rate multiplied by the average number of hours they worked in the six months prior to filing to take leave.
- The policy excludes seasonal employees or temporary employees and would require part-time workers to have worked at least 625 hours in the past six months to be eligible.
- The policy clarifies that the county’s parental leave policy would run concurrently with the Family and Medical Leave Act, so that employers would only be required to provide a maximum of 12 weeks of parental leave, not 24.
The Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which represents a number of large businesses in the area, said in a statement that it is still opposed to the parental leave policy even with the revisions. “The core structure of the policy remains problematic,” the statement said. “Mandating a 100% employer-paid requirement — rather than utilizing a state-level, insurance-based funding model common in other jurisdictions — places an uncompetitive financial and administrative burden directly on local employers.”
The proposed policy would be unique nationally in that it would be enacted by a county, rather than a state. It would differ from state policies which do not require employers to cover the full cost of the benefit.
Snyder asked the Health Department administrators whether they considered waiting for a parental leave policy to pass in Harrisburg. Joyce said any policies in Harrisburg would likely take precedence over a county policy but that the department leaders did not want to wait.
“We could wait but we don’t want to,” Joyce said. “We want to make sure we are taking a proactive approach to public health for the families in Allegheny County.”
Oliver Morrison is the health and environment reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org.
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