Media Release

For Immediate Release Contact Phone
February 5, 2007 Phyllis Salowe-Kaye 973-643-8800 ext. 14

Statement of Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, Executive Director and Ev Liebman, Program Director on S2249 – Family Leave Insurance

NJ Senate Labor Committee Hearing – February 5, 2007

Good morning, my name is Phyllis Salowe-Kaye and I am the Executive Director of New Jersey Citizen Action (NJCA). Our Program Director, Ev Liebman, is with me this morning as well. Thank you, Chairman Sweeney and members of the Committee, for giving us the opportunity to express our views on this critically important program.

Citizen Action is the State's largest citizen watchdog organization, representing more than 100 labor, tenant, religious, community, women's, environmental, civil rights and senior organizations and 60,000 family members who live throughout New Jersey. For our entire organizational history we have worked to improve the quality of life for NJ's working families and seniors. We are here today to urge you to Vote YES on S2249.

Family Leave Insurance is a program whose time has come. In November of last year, we, through the Time to Care Coalition, a broad based coalition we co-founded to work for the adoption of this program, conducted a poll of NJ voters about Family Leave Insurance. Fully 78% of poll respondents support this program. It is a no-brainer why – practically every working adult finds themselves in a situation, whether it be because of a newborn or newly adopted child, an ill child or parent, that creates a conflict between their ability to care for their loved ones and paying their bills and/or keeping their job. And the conflicts are growing:

So our members and the citizenry at large realize we need insurance to protect ourselves against these relatively infrequent, but critical life events. The program before you is modeled after a program already up and running in California, which like NJ is one of only 5 states in the country that has a form of TDI.

The plan is simple. NJ's TDI system offers a perfect framework – it already provides partial wage replacement to people who need time off from work for their own illness or injury, including pregnancy. Under S2249, the expansion of the current TDI program into a family system would be completely employee funded. Workers only would make a small additional payment to the TDI fund. By covering the whole workforce, as NJ does now with TDI, premium rates are far lower than an individual company could get on its own, even if this type of insurance was available – which it's not. The employee cost is estimated to range from $0.28 (for a minimum wage worker) to $1.71 (for someone making $90,000 or more) per week. As our poll indicates, New Jerseyans are more than ready to support this small expense for the security of knowing they have some protection against a family crisis, or in the case of birth or adoption, a family blessing.

We are also here before you as a small employer. We provide our 25 employees with paid family leave and, from our own experience, we can say that it has had a positive effect on our organization. Not only does it help us recruit more qualified staff, it also allows us to maintain a strong and experienced workforce by increasing morale and loyalty, thereby reducing turnover. We are not saying that providing these benefits is always easy; but we find a way to work through it, because we know how important it is for our employees to be with their families when they are needed the most. S2249 will make it easier for us to provide these benefits by offsetting some of our costs.

Now we know, as we have in the past that we will hear from the business lobby and some business owners that they are prepared to fight this initiative with everything they've got. We're sorry to hear that. We think they are dead wrong about this program and its impact on both employers and employees. For example, and contrary to what you may hear, expanding TDI to provide temporary family disability insurance benefits is not a new government mandate and it does not establish new job protection rights for NJ employees. It is NOT a one-size-fits-all program! While this relatively modest insurance program would be available to all NJ workers, as is TDI, it won't be used in a one-size fits all fashion. The parent who needs to care for child coping with leukemia won't be taking the same leave as the worker who is settling his father into a nursing home or the mother who is caring for a newborn. And like TDI, the leave can only be taken if it is supported by medical certification. Moreover, it is time for the business lobby to acknowledge that any successful business – large or small – needs to have provisions for unexpected employee absences. This program, allows all businesses in NJ (not just the wealthiest ones) to more easily make these provisions and at their own employees expense.

There is nothing in the program that requires a small employer (less than 50 employees) to hold an employees job while they are on family leave. And if the employer can't because of the particular needs of its business, (although we of course hope they would), it doesn't have to. However, with this program in place an employee who must stop working because of a family crisis or blessing would at least have some wages, as opposed to the current situation which would be no job and no wages. The program will also help those employees who now have the right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act and/or the State's Family Leave Act to actually afford to take the leave because, and once again, they will be able to pay the bills while caring for their family. And they will be able to pay these bills because of an insurance program, a program that is not in any way paid for by the employer.

The business lobby also cries that this program is bad for business, it will ruin our business climate, it will hurt the economy. To that rhetoric we say, the citizens of New Jersey are the economy too and the business lobby has no lock on what's good for it. After all, without the millions of working men and women in NJ we wouldn't have much of an economy. And, the sky has certainly not fallen in California.

The business lobby's ideological reaction is not supported by the facts. Not only do many employers already find ways to accommodate critical family leaves, a number of employers already provide partial or full wage replacement to their staff.

We urge the naysayers and doubters to view this program through the lens of the 21st century and the current demands being placed on employees, particularly low-income workers who in a high cost of living state like New Jersey are particularly stressed. For example, low-income women average significantly less pay than their male counterparts, partly because of job loss due to family care. This is one reason the US has the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world – not a statistic anyone should be proud of.

In 1985, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in his book Family and Nation that "No government, however firm might be its wish, can avoid having policies that profoundly influence family relationships. This is not to be avoided. The only option is whether these will be purposeful, intended policies or whether they will be residual, derivative, in a sense concealed." As Senator Moynihan knew, what we do as decision and policymakers have real effects on people's lives and their families. We have seen tremendous changes in New Jersey's workplace and in our families - it would not be an overstatement to say the changes have been dramatic, but the policies in place that our government has designed to mitigate the risks have been frozen in time, leaving in particular, our most vulnerable families at risk. The time is now to adopt policies that meet the challenges created by these dramatic changes, policies that are "purposeful" and positive.

As editorialized by the Star Ledger on December 5, 2006, "While business and industry continue to oppose the Sweeney bill, this is the sort of adjustment that society must make now that nuclear families with a June Cleaver-like mom at home are no longer the norm in America".

The vast majority of New Jerseyans understand this too and support Family Leave Insurance. It's time for this Committee, the Legislature and the Governor to join the crowd.

Thank you very much for your consideration of S2249 and we are available to answer any questions you may have.

###

New Jersey Citizen Action is the state's largest citizen watchdog coalition, representing more than 60,000 family members and over 110 affiliated groups.
To Top