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New mandated leave alert in California.
Employers in the Golden State will soon be required to offer employees up to five days’ leave for a reproductive loss.
California’s SB 848 requires both private and public employers with five or more workers to allow employees to request time off if they’ve suffered a reproductive loss. The measure stipulates that the leave doesn’t need to be taken consecutively and can be taken within three months of the loss event.
Reproductive loss. California defines reproductive loss as a failed adoption, failed surrogacy, miscarriage, stillbirth, or an unsuccessful assisted reproduction.
“Workers are often playing the ‘boss lottery,’ depending on what their access to flexible benefits might be,” said Jen Stark, codirector of the Center for Business and Social Justice at BSR. “This [law] tries to mitigate some of the ‘boss lottery’; if I tell my boss that I’m experiencing pregnancy loss or miscarriage, that I should have access to leave.”
Stark said the measure “comes down fundamentally to treating workers with dignity and respect” and highlights how complicated an individual employee’s healthcare journey may be.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure into law last week. The new law builds on California's Fair Employment and Housing Act, which allows employees to take up to five days of bereavement leave due to the loss of a family member.
“This is a complex experience that largely affects women in the workforce—they make up half the workforce—and we just need a set of benefits to adapt to that, without having to name every individual experience that folks might encounter,” Stark said.
But federally? The measure highlights an ongoing need for a federal policy for paid family and medical leave, Stark said. It’s an issue the Society for Human Resource Management has named as one of its public policy priorities.
“We still have an ongoing unmet need in the United States for national paid family medical leave,” she said. “If we had more systemic change or a national policy around paid leave…we wouldn’t need to continue to have companies break into silos the complexity of individual reproductive healthcare journeys.”
HR teams with employees working in California should reexamine leave policies now. The new law goes into effect on Jan. 1. But HR pros across the US can go the extra mile and provide a generous and broad leave policy to encompass a whole host of reasons employees might need time away from the workplace to address their healthcare needs, Stark said.
“Workplace policy should be crafted in an accessible, inclusive way that provides workers with attractive benefits so that they can be productive and workplace-ready and healthy,” she said. “I do worry about moving into a direction where we have to name every health instance that folks might have to access. It becomes a lot administratively to have to manage, and at the end of the day, how many more folks are covered or protected by it? I don’t know.”