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be taken as required.
- Require that intermittent leave be tracked in increments of
at least half a day.
- Clarify that, for purposes of making perfect attendance
awards, employers may count FMLA leaves as absences.
Hostetler also outlined proposals that she said would
help parents who want to spend more time with their infants but cannot afford to be out of
work without pay. She urged the lawmakers to:
- Explore the use of employee pretax savings accounts to fund family
leaves.
- Encourage flexible work arrangements-including job sharing, flextime
and telecommuting-through tax incentives and the removal of current obstacles or
disincentives.
- Promote utilization of existing tax credits for adoption assistance,
which employers may use to help adoptive parents.
Todd L. Shimkus, vice president of the North Central Massachusetts
Chamber of Commerce, argued that paid parental leave would be an improper use of UC
funds--but that worker training programs would not be.
Shimkus, who also spoke on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
described how Massachusetts recently "bifurcated" its unemployment compensation
program to divert a portion of the money into a new Workforce Training Fund.
He acknowledged that some BAA-UC proponents may argue that using
unemployment compensation for paid FMLA leave is no more radical a departure from
tradition than using the money for worker training.
However, Shimkus said, the diversion of unemployment compensation to
provide paid family leave "will not improve either the employment skills of those
employees or the aggregrate innovation capacity of their employers.
"Furthermore, this diversion of funds does not result in
employee promotions or wage and benefit increases, as the successful completion of
training programs often does. |
Nor
will such a diversion of funds reduce the amount of time UI benefits will need to be paid
to an employee facing an involuntary layoff," he said.
Jack F. Wheatley, director of the Michigan Unemployment Agency, testified that the
proposed program, while voluntary, is a "serious departure" from the intended
purpose of the UI program.
"Over the history of the unemployment insurance program, employers have been
consistently told that the taxes that are collected both from the federal unemployment
taxes and the state unemployment taxes will be used solely for purposes associated with
paying benefits to individuals who are unemployed through no fault of their own," he
said. Besides two DOL officials, two witnesses testified in
support of the BAA-UC proposal.
Maurice Emsellem, director of public policy for the National
Employment Law Project, said allowing unemployment compensation to be paid to parents on
FMLA leave would increase the likelihood that they would remain part of the workforce.
That is especially important, Emsellem said, when employers are in dire need of workers
and many low-income workers are struggling to stay out of poverty and off of public
assistance.
"The BAA-UC program thus represents the next logical step in
the evolution of the UC system to accommodate the changing circumstances of today's
working families," he said.
Also testifying was Connecticut state Rep.
Christopher G. Donovan, author of a bill to provide up to 12 weeks of wage replacement
annually for workers temporarily on leave to care for infants or deal with their or a
family member's serious illness.
Donovan said his proposal to provide unemployment benefits so that a
family member may temporarily care for a newborn or adopted child would be
"consistent" with other current uses of Connecticut's Unemployment Insurance
Fund, such as quitting a job to avoid domestic violence.
Robert W. Thompson, Managing Editor of HR News
Taken from www.SHRM.org - The official website for the
Society of Human Resources Management
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