Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
As the federal courts weigh the fate of abortion pill mifepristone, companies and HR departments can do little more than wait.
“These cases impact employers of all sizes in every state,” said Jen Stark, co-director of the Center for Business and Social Justice at BSR, a nonprofit group that works with companies on social justice issues. “There’s a lot of impact, but candidly, very little [that] companies can do within their walls at this moment.”
Following the Supreme Court’s decision last summer to overturn Roe v. Wade, many companies developed policies preserving access to reproductive healthcare for their employees in states where access is banned or restricted, including covering or subsidizing the cost of transportation expenses to access care.
“[For] employers who haven’t yet [begun to] or can continue to evaluate and commit resources and update programs and policies to ensure that access to reproductive healthcare is inclusive and accessible across their workforce, that’s certainly still a need,” said Stark, who has held roles at Planned Parenthood, the University of North Carolina, and the American Red Cross. “But at the same time, while we all watch what ping-pongs between the courts in the days ahead, there’s not more bus, plane, or train tickets that employers can help offset and offer.”
According to Stark, it’s on business leaders to speak out against this ruling publicly, and to communicate behind the scenes to lawmakers in states advancing additional abortion restrictions about health and safety implications to their workforce, as well as their effects on a business’s ability to attract and retain talent.
Recent BSR research found that almost 90% of adults who accepted a job that required them to move considered the state’s social policies before committing.
The survey data suggested that 52% of US adults prefer to live in a state where abortion is legal and accessible compared to 22% who say they would prefer to live in one where abortion is illegal and inaccessible, though one-quarter of respondents did not know or had no opinion.
“Employed adults are increasingly thinking about ways their employer can offset the harm at a state level, whether that’s increased paid time-off, increased benefits,” Stark said. “The low-hanging-fruit things that companies can do have largely been done…Now it’s time to do the hard systems-change work that workers, increasingly millennials and Gen Z, are expecting their employers to engage in.”—AD