Pima County’s employees will now make 100% of their regular salaries when taking parental leave, the Board of Supervisors decided last week in a 4-1 vote.
For the last five years, county workers taking leave after the birth or adoption of a child earned 66⅔% of their regular pay for six weeks while taking on the strenuous and costly task of caring for a new child.
We are sharing Arizona Daily Star reporters' and photographers' favorite work from 2021.
The new policy comes at an estimated $250,000 annual cost, which was calculated from the 723 employees who have taken leave since 2016.
Supervisor Rex Scott said he asked the county’s human resources department to look into the matter after following national discussions of parental leave policies — a key provision federal lawmakers have pushed for in Democrats’ Build Back Better plan.
“It caused me to wonder, what is it that we do for our employees?” he said. “If the same number of employees participate in parental leave in the next five years, then that’s going to be more than 700 families that are going to have less to worry about right after they brought a new life into this world. And I think that’s a good thing, and it’s a good thing for a pretty small cost.”
Only 26% of state and local government workers had access to paid family leave as of March 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while 23% of civilian workers had access.
“It disproportionately impacts people that are in the lower-income brackets, people of color, that can’t save money when they’re going to have a baby. Getting 33% less in your check for six weeks is difficult,” Supervisor Adelita Grijalva said. “There’s an expense related to having children. It really discourages people from taking the full six weeks because you’re losing money every week that you’re not working.”
Besides the moralistic implications of providing county employees fully paid parental leave, the policy change was pushed as a way to recruit more workers. The county currently employs 6,694 people and has 1,222 vacancies.
“Considering the dramatic change in the labor market during the pandemic, this is one change of many that I am reviewing with our deputy county administrators and human resources to improve recruitment,” acting County Administrator Jan Lesher wrote in a memo to the board.
And many competing employers, such as the city of Tucson, already provide up to six weeks of fully paid parental leave.
“We certainly have vacancies that we need to fill. And I think we always need to be looking at what are we doing to be an attractive and supportive employer and how does that compare with other employers in the area?” Scott said.
Lesher said the county is working on other incentives such as more flexible telecommuting policies, higher starting salaries and tuition reimbursement, but that the new parental leave policy was a more pressing matter.
“This is (a policy) that not only staff, but members of the board felt was important enough to move through very quickly so that we’re actually making sure that we’re doing what many of the national standards are doing, which is providing the full benefit during parental leave,” she said.
But Supervisor Steve Christy, the only dissenting vote last Tuesday on the new policy, wasn’t convinced increasing the pay for parental leave was necessary.
“Certainly to have to come up with a quarter-of-a-million dollars annually to pay people not to work, I think that requires some good explanation and information more than just saying that this is being competitive in the workplace,” he said.
Grijalva, who relied on the full-pay parental leave policies of her former employer, said the postpartum experience justifies the policy change.
“If I didn’t have (paid parental leave), it would have been really difficult for me to focus on what I needed to focus on,” she said. “It just completely and totally discounts what happens when a child comes home and the kind of bonding that has to happen and the kind of recovery. They’re life-changing experiences whether you’ve had children or not.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Grijalva pushed to expand the paid leave to 12 weeks, which Scott said he’s “very supportive” of.
“I’m going to be interested to see what we hear back from the administration about what the cost would be to extend the leave period at that 100% salary, and I’m supportive of that. Of course, I want to find out what the cost would be,” he said. “But I can’t imagine that it’s going to be that burdensome to the county, especially in comparison to what it’ll mean for our employees. And we should always be looking at the well-being of our employees.”
