Republican Delegate Kirk Cox (Colonial Heights), soon to be Speaker of the House of the House of Delegates, is proposing a bill that would give all full time employees in the General Assembly 12 weeks of paid leave following the birth or adoption of a child. He would also support extending this benefit to all state employees. (Isn’t he generous with our money? Or does he, like so many Democrats, consider our money to be his money?)
From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
“As a society, we have to do more to strengthen families and encourage women to remain in the workplace,” Cox, whom House Republicans named as “speaker-designee” earlier this year, said in a prepared statement.
From the Washington Post:
“Family is the bedrock of our society, and there’s nothing more important to a family than those first few months at home as they welcome and share joyous moments with their new child,” Cox said. “As a society, we have to do more to strengthen families and encourage women to remain in the workplace. Strong parental leave policies improve morale and reduce turnover, two things critical in public sector workplaces.”
This would give Virginia the most generous family leave plan for public employees in the nation. The federal government allows employees to use sick leave, earned annual leave, and borrowing sick leave from other employees.
More from the Times-Dispatch:
Currently, state employees looking to take time off can use accrued personal leave, sick leave or short-term disability, a policy Cox called “inadequate.”
“No mother or father should have to use accrued benefits, which they may need at another point, to care for their child and live out the joys of parenthood,” Cox said.
Why shouldn’t state employees use accrued benefits, just as the federal employees do, when they choose to have or adopt a baby? Does Virginia really need to have the most generous family leave plan in the nation? Where might the money come from to pay for this plan? Is the Speaker-elect trying to compete with Democrats in his generosity with our money?
23 comments
May I be so bold as to ask what rule was broken by my earlier post that would have caused it to be deleted?
I can’t believe a Republican is proposing this, much less the soon to be speaker. We already require businesses to give unpaid leave to an employee without threat of being fired, even though the workload for that person has to be picked up by their colleagues or by temporary hires.
Now we are talking about sliding down that slippery slope even farther. For what reason does a man need to have three months of paid leave when his wife has a baby? Not only that, but does anyone believe that the first three months are the only ones where a baby needs constant attention from its mother? Anyone who thinks that doesn’t have children. Not only that, but it is a proven fact that a couple where both husband and wife work will almost always spend more money in childcare services for a young child than the wife makes, and the lack of the mother’s presence in those formative years is detrimental to the child’s development and relationship with their parents.
We need to take responsibility for our choices, not push forward feel good measures that drive up costs and are really anti-family in their design, because they make people believe that they can have it all.
Is John McCain a Republican? Yes or no? (I say yes.)
Yes, McCain is in fact a republican. On his reelection day.
Yes and during the campaign he’s gonna build the wall on his state’s border… not so much when the dopes re-elect him.
Why that Reid fellow said for the GOP to win in Va you have to appeal to the new Virginia voter. You need to be more like Democrats to do that or you can’t win elections. Big government, paid leave, free college, free health care.
Come on Jeanine, get with the times! You aint winning elections here by talking about having a border, cutting government or not giving people free stuff.
180 out of 183 countries in the world guarantee paid leave for maternity and/or paternity for all citizens. The idea that this benefit is considered some kind of radical overreach only speaks to how incredibly backwards and anti-social the American perspective has become. We are a society, not an archipelago of disconnected individuals, and paid maternity leave (and/or paternity leave) has a host of benefits at a very small cost. A cost that is well-known and predictable based on the panoply of other developed countries we can compare to. Only the most outre voluntarist libertarian (of which this site appears to have some) would claim we owe no duty of care to others, and this is among the most basic and clearly beneficials of social duties we can implement.
I think this benefit should be mandatory for all Virginia workers. Public, private, man, woman, or whatever. If it’s good enough for bureaucrats it’s good enough for everyone.
How much do I have to pay for that benefit?
Only ten percent of your income.
The LAST ten percent.
But Trump would finally get the Dems onboard.
Is the new Republican creed:
We don’t want you to abort them
And
We don’t want you to care for them
?
Pro family my ass
Thank you Delegate Cox for understanding the earliest days of infancy are so very important for parent and child. Finally a pro family policy that is actually and measurably, pro family! Finally a truly necessary and important policy- Eileen Davis, RN
I have also wondered whether Kirk Cox is a republican by commonly accepted definitions of smaller government and greater freedom and personal responsibility.
Cox can use the same argument in order to justify expanded Medicaid, free health insurance, free birth control, free cell phones, and all sorts of other “gimmees” commonly associated with the Democratic party.
It will be hard enough with a bare majority, and harder still if the Speaker is actually a closet-democrat.
its no more “of a gimme” that the 3 weeks vacation you managed to negotiate for far less reason, because,…golf?
We have our work cut for us. Capitulation to the belief that government is God is exactly what the religion of secular-humanism wants to see. Men over God is dark.
So paying parents their normal salary while they are home taking care of their families after a child is born is now believing government is God? Isn’t it government being pro-family?
If a private sector business wishes to, so be it, not government employees.
What’s the difference?
The publics money, my money, not theirs.
It’s money you are already paying them for doing their job. Are they supposed to work for free? This isn’t giving them extra anything – it’s just continuing to pay them their salary for up to 3 months while they take care of their new baby.
The horror!
They are already are compensated more than enough. More is not good in a job that consumes wealth not create it.
That’s what I’m saying. All you are doing is paying them the salary that was budgeted for them already. That’s it. Nobody is getting more than was agreed upon. We are the pro-family party, why not make work easier for workers to be pro-family?
The public would be getting less value from what most government jobs already do which is provide little to no value at all to ordinary working men and women. LESS VALUE, LESS BANG FOR THE TAX PAYER BUCK, is not good. Placed into the hands of the public to decide, via referendum, it would be rejected like square peg trying to fit in a round hole.