Oops! Here's What Happens When Family and Medical Leave Policies Are Mandated

While most people believe that people should be able to take time off work for either medical or family needs without the risk of losing their job, when these policies are mandated and not voluntarily offered by employers, it tends to have some negative consequences.

According to a recent economic analysis, family and medical leave laws have had a negative impact on women’s wages.

“In the decade prior to the passage of the Family Medical Leave Act in 1993—a federal law that guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected family or medical leave to workers in companies with 50 or more employees—white women’s wages had been converging relative to white men’s at a rate of 0.70 percentage points per year,” explains the Daily Signal. “In the decade after passage of the FMLA, the rate of convergence fell to 0.03 percentage points. The rate of convergence for black women to white men fell from 0.30 percentage points per year prior to passage of the FMLA to 0.05 percentage points after.”

Now, of course, PJ Media readers know that the alleged gender pay gap doesn’t actually exist. The left still doesn’t want to believe this and currently claims that women only make 82 cents for every dollar men make. Of course, sex discrimination in compensation has been illegal since the Equal Pay Act of 1963, yet the left still believes there is a significant pay gap between men and women.

For example, in 2009, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to “fix” the problem, which didn’t work because equal pay was already the law of the land and the way the left calculates the wage gap creates the illusion of a pay gap. We know this because when Obama was called out for a gender pay gap in his own White House, the White House pointed out that “men and women in equivalent roles earn equivalent salaries.”

This was not only true of the Obama White House, but it is also true nationwide. Once you account for variables such as occupation, education, years in the workplace, and hours worked, the alleged pay gap between men and women disappears. The problem is that compulsory family and medical leave contributes to the appearance that women aren’t being paid as much as men because women — contrary to radical leftist gender theory — are the ones who get pregnant, give birth to babies, and are responsible for early child care. As such, women are more likely to take extended periods of time out of the workplace, which slows down their professional development — and, of course, has a negative impact on their pay.

The left doesn’t understand that its attempts to fix one problem tend to cause another, and as the Daily Signal noted, “Paid family leave is something Americans want, but not with the costs and consequences that federal programs and mandates entail.”