Virginia advocates and lawmakers push paid family leave. Business groups are opposed.

Dec. 26--Prince William County resident David Larrimore still remembers the taste of chemotherapy drugs in his mouth as he worked -- or tried to -- through six months of cancer treatment.

He had to, like the thousands who don't take the family medical leave that a 26-year-old federal law promises won't cost them their jobs, because he couldn't afford to pay his bills if he stopped working -- including the medical bills that eventually outran his health insurance coverage.

"I was lucky, I had a wonderful boss and a workplace that bent over backwards for me," he said.

The Family and Medical Leave Act protects employees' jobs, but it doesn't say anything about paying people while on leave -- although Congress has just passed legislation that says federal employees taking family leave will be paid.

Eight states, and the District of Columbia have also enacted paid leave laws -- and Larrimore thinks Virginia should follow suit.

So does the Prince William County legislator from the other side of I-95. But business groups are likely to oppose the system as too costly, as they've done in the past.

A legislator's story

"I didn't have paid leave. When my twins were born, prematurely, and had to go to the NICU, I had to face this choice: Do I stay here in the hospital and do the new mom things that I'm supposed to be doing or do I go back to work so we can pay the bills and so we would have a home to go back to?" said Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Prince William.

She went back to work.

And, two and half years later -- now a member of the Virginia General Assembly -- she's at work on a bill that would launch paid family leave in Virginia.

The bill would create a state-run insurance pool that would operate the same way Virginia's unemployment insurance does. Basically, employer and employee would split the cost of the premium 50-50.

If employees needed to take family or medical leave -- whether to care for a newborn, an ill child or spouse, or an aging parent; or to recover from an accident or illness -- the pool would pay 80% of their salary during their leave, for a period of up to 12 weeks.

For someone earning $30,000 a year, that should translate to $2.25 a week out of his or her paycheck, with the employer kicking in the same amount. For someone earning $50,000, the weekly contribution would be $3.76.

The bills would require the state to put up $73.5 million to start the program, a sum that would be repaid from premiums collected during the first two years, based on the experience of states that have adopted similar programs.

The $33.5 million administrative cost of the program would be covered by those premiums, in the same way as the Virginia Employment Commission's costs for the unemployment insurance are.

The total payouts from the fund would run at about $1 billion, according to calculations by the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, a Richmond-based think tank. The estimate uses a model developed by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and uses Virginia census data on the age, sex and income people with jobs, as well as estimates about frequency of medical conditions and accidents that might spark a request for leave.

Employers try

U.S. Department of Labor surveys show just under one fifth of employers offer paid leave as a benefit -- but that nearly half of American workers who need to take leave get some pay while they're out. In many cases, the employees take sick days or vacation time. For about half, the leave they take amounts to only 10 days -- fewer than one-sixth take leaves approaching the 12 weeks allowed by federal law.

Even so, about 5% of all employees said they didn't take family or medical leave when they needed to because, like Larrimore and Carroll Foy, they simply couldn't afford to, the labor department survey found.

Sometimes, employers work out ways of helping employees take leave and not see too hard a hit to their finances.

For Larrimore, the deal worked like this: He'd take a sick day, or when they ran out, vacation days, every other Wednesday for a day at Georgetown University Hospital for an intensive infusion of medication.

He'd head home in the evening with an balloon-like rubber bag full of medicine plugged into his chest, through a needle. His boss let him work from home the Thursday and Friday, as he dealt with side effects ranging from extreme sensitivity when touching things to a never-ending tingling in his fingers and feet.

When the medication ran out on Fridays, he'd collapse, tired to the bone, suffering nausea. At first, that phase lasted through Monday. After the first couple of months, the cumulative effect left him feeling sick all the time. He worked as best as he could -- but he used up all his remaining vacation time when he couldn't.

Being able to take the final few months off work, without taking the financial hit of no paycheck, would have been a huge relief, he said.

In Norfolk, Rebekah Hastey has been through several options.

When her oldest son was born, she lived in New Jersey, which had a state-run, employee- and employer-funded paid leave insurance pool.

"Nothing had to change in our day to day lives except that we had a baby," she said. "I remember the day after we brought him home, there was a big snowstorm and I looked out the window at people trudging to the bus and thinking I didn't have to go out there with a baby and I could afford a roof over my head."

Her husband also took family leave, with pay, for a few weeks.

"He had never changed diapers before," she said. He learned a lot about caring for a newborn, but the real payoff was being able to bond closely, Hastey added.

When the family moved to Virginia, her employer offered a short term disability plan, which paid for six weeks at 60% of her salary, working on an helpline for elderly people in need of services.

"Can you imagine, trying to do that when your baby is crying in the background?" she said.

"We were asking ourselves: Can we even afford ice cream? Can we afford day care?" In the end, her day care provider cut her a break that not everyone gets -- she reserved a place for Hastey's oldest son without charging her the $160 a week fee to make sure he had a place, so the little boy could stay home and the family could save that expense.

Hastey, who'd been saving a nest egg to help the family through, figures the premiums she paid for the disability coverage of the course of a year pretty much matched the benefit she received.

"It was kind of a forced savings plan," she said, adding that took a year to catch up with the credit cards bills that mounted up during her leave.

Business groups opposed

She had changed jobs before her daughter's birth last year, and working for a working for a church-run preschool meant no disability insurance anymore.

She worked out an agreement that volunteers could come in an cover for her, while she was out but being paid, while the church agreed to let her bring her baby in to work with her for four months, saving on day care while Hastey ran the preschool's summer program.

"I strapped her to my front -- she had a little shirt that said "camp director" and she was the camp director!" Hastey said.

"I won the boss lottery," she added. "What about people who aren't as lucky?"

Vicki Shabo, senior fellow at the Better Life Lab research arm of the New America foundation, thinks ad hoc arrangements like those Larrimore and Hastey worked out show a real interest by employers in helping out.

And she's hoping that the insurance approach Carroll Foy and state Sen. Jennifer Boysko are proposing will look like an affordable way to do something that many employers would like to do, if they could afford it.

It could be a battle.

Nicole Riley, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, said her small business members don't like the idea of a state-run plan.

"It lacks flexibility, and it can be really costly for them," she said.

Other business groups spoke out against efforts last year -- but, oddly, while their opposition is usually enough to kill legislation on employer-employee relations, the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee asked for a special joint subcommittee to study the issue.

While the subcommittee didn't recommend a particular bill, state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, reported that senators wanted to continue exploring the issue to find a flexible, affordable approach that wouldn't hurt Virginia businesses' competitive position.

Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com

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