The United States is one of only three countries that do not mandate paid parental leave out of 177 nations, according to researchers at McGill and Harvard universities. The other two are Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
That is from an article today's
Washington Post titled
Landmark family leave law doesn’t help millions of workers.
By the way, officially I am not covered, because I did not have 1250 hours in at my current school before Leaves on the Current found out about her cancer and I had to take time off. So this is an issue on which I have some sensitivity.
Especially when I read something like this:
And even when workers are covered by the law, they are sometimes penalized for taking advantage of it, as court cases and 5,375 labor violations show. Workers covered by the law have been fired for asking for leave to care for chronically ill parents or to accompany a dying father to the hospital.
Yet another issue on which the legislation for which we fought so long and so hard is still very insufficient.
We have horrible economic inequity.
We do not provide economic security for so many, even among the seniors for whom Social Security and Medicare were supposed to make a difference, and yet there is real pressure to cut benefits, whether by chained CPI or outright slashing or raising age eligibility as if everyone worked in an office without tension and not doing hard physical labor as do many.
We are number 1 in things for which we should be ashamed - incarceration rate, gun death rates among industrialized democracies . .
So when will we own up to the fact that our American Exceptionalism too often is an illustration of why we should at least be embarrassed if not outright ashamed by our country?