The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to mandate that employers offer six weeks of paid leave for new parents at 100 percent of an employee’s salary, making the city the first place in the U.S. to enact fully paid family leave.
With the unanimous board vote on Tuesday, San Francisco also becomes an international outlier in offering generous paid family leave to partners. But it will still lag behind nearly all rich countries in paid maternity leave. (The state of California already offered six weeks of family leave to new moms and partners, but only at 55 percent of their wages.)
This is the second big step forward for paid-leave advocates in the past week. On Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill funding 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents, at 50 percent of a worker’s paycheck, administered by the state and funded through a payroll tax.
The United States is the only developed country whose government doesn’t guarantee paid leave to new parents. The real innovation in San Francisco’s and New York’s laws is that both mothers and their partners will benefit. And partners benefit the most, at least compared with those in other rich countries.
By the time it’s fully phased in, employed partners of new moms in New York state will have 12 weeks of paid time off to care for a new baby, ranking between Iceland and Finland among countries that offer paid parental leave at any level that are tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And those in San Francisco will have more paid weeks off than partners in Spain, Denmark or the United Kingdom.1
However, San Francisco and New York state will still rank near the bottom internationally in paid maternity leave. Mexico offers 12 weeks of paid leave to mothers — and that’s the fewest of any nation in the OECD besides the United States. The average number of weeks offered in these countries is 54 weeks.
| FOR MOTHERS | FOR FATHERS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PLACE | LENGTH (WEEKS) | PLACE | LENGTH (WEEKS) | ||
| Estonia | 166 | Korea | 53 | ||
| Slovak Rep. | 164 | Japan | 52 | ||
| Finland | 161 | France | 28 | ||
| Hungary | 160 | Luxembourg | 26 | ||
| Bulgaria | 110 | Portugal | 21 | ||
| Czech Rep. | 110 | Belgium | 19 | ||
| Latvia | 94 | Iceland | 13 | ||
| Norway | 91 | New York (state) | 12 | ||
| Korea | 65 | Norway | 10 | ||
| Lithuania | 62 | Sweden | 10 | ||
| Romania | 61 | Finland | 9 | ||
| Austria | 60 | Germany | 9 | ||
| Sweden | 60 | Austria | 9 | ||
| Germany | 58 | Croatia | 9 | ||
| Japan | 58 | San Francisco | 6 | ||
| Croatia | 56 | Lithuania | 4 | ||
| Slovenia | 52 | Bulgaria | 2 | ||
| Canada | 52 | Slovenia | 2 | ||
| Poland | 52 | Spain | 2 | ||
| Denmark | 50 | Estonia | 2 | ||
| Italy | 48 | Poland | 2 | ||
| Greece | 43 | Denmark | 2 | ||
| France | 42 | UK | 2 | ||
| Luxembourg | 42 | Australia | 2 | ||
| UK | 39 | Latvia | 1 | ||
| Belgium | 32 | Hungary | 1 | ||
| Portugal | 30 | Romania | 1 | ||
| Chile | 30 | Chile | 1 | ||
| Iceland | 26 | Mexico | 1 | ||
| Ireland | 26 | Greece | 0 | ||
| Australia | 18 | Netherlands | 0 | ||
| Cyprus | 18 | Italy | 0 | ||
| Malta | 18 | Malta | 0 | ||
| Netherlands | 16 | Slovak Rep. | 0 | ||
| New Zealand | 16 | Czech Rep. | 0 | ||
| Spain | 16 | Canada | 0 | ||
| Turkey | 16 | Ireland | 0 | ||
| Israel | 14 | Cyprus | 0 | ||
| Switzerland | 14 | New Zealand | 0 | ||
| New York (state) | 12 | Turkey | 0 | ||
| Mexico | 12 | Israel | 0 | ||
| San Francisco | 6 | Switzerland | 0 | ||
| United States | 0 | United States | 0 | ||
These rankings reflect paid parental leave laws in place as of April 2015, according to newly released statistics from the OECD. The measures reflect both paid maternity/paternity leave — taken around the time of childbirth — and paid parental leave, a supplemental amount given in some countries to allow parents to care for a child in their first few months.
CLARIFICATION (April 7, 10:50 a.m.): The data in the table accompanying this article includes parental leave available to mothers and parental leave reserved for fathers, according to the OECD. It does not include a sharable paid-leave entitlement for the family, available in Sweden, Denmark, and some other countries, which allows fathers to potentially take more weeks of paid leave.