What might federal paid family leave look like? (I’ll give you a sneak peak.)

Sorry, Eagles fans. It doesn’t cover taking the fam to today’s parade.

(I’ll post some pics tomorrow).

Paid Family Leave = Early Social Security?

Seung Min Kim has a story in Politico (here) about how Marco Rubio (FL-R) “is in the early stages of crafting a paid leave plan that congressional Republicans and the Trump administration could get behind.”

The plan is to allow employees to “allow[] people to draw Social Security benefits when they want to take time off for a new baby or other family-related matters, and then delay their checks when they hit retirement age. For instance, a person who would begin receiving full benefits when he or she turns 67 years old but wants to take six weeks of paid leave wouldn’t draw Social Security benefits until six weeks after his or her 67th birthday.”

Tyrone Richardson at Bloomberg Law’s Daily Labor Report reports here that other GOP Senators are getting in on the act too. During a conference call yesterday, we learned that Rubio, Mike Lee (UT), and Joni Ernst (IA) are working with the Independent Women’s Forum on the paid family leave legislation. According to the IWF’s website, the plan doesn’t involve delaying Social Security benefits to allowing parents to take paid family leave.

No, no, no.

Instead, “the federal government [will] provide paid parental leave to every worker in the United States at no additional cost: offer new parents the opportunity to collect early Social Security benefits after the arrival of their child in exchange for their agreeing to defer the collection of their Social Security retirement benefits.”

What other options are on the board?

Now, this isn’t the first foray into paid family leave at the federal level. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-D) introduced the FAMILY Act about a year ago. The FAMILY Act would entitle “every individual to a family and medical leave insurance (FMLI) benefit payment for each month beginning on the first day of the month in which the individual meets the criteria specified below and ending 365 days later.”

And then you have “Workflex in the 21st Century Act” (you can view it here), which is a House bill that the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) helped draft with U.S. Rep. Mimi Walters (R-CA). Workflex would amend ERISA and, under the plan, employers would offer at least one of the following workflex arrangements to each eligible employee: compressed work schedule, biweekly work program, telecommuting program, job-sharing program, flexible scheduling or a predictable schedule. The rub is that Workflex would preempt any existing state paid family leave laws.

So, when does federal paid family leave — in some form or another — become law?

It depends.

(What did you expect me to say?)

Ok, how about sometime before the Cleveland Browns Super Bowl?