Leave-Taking Led to Higher Support

The findings are not only timely, but they also provide the strongest evidence yet of how COVID has changed employers’ minds about paid family leave, Rossin-Slater says. Since 2016, she and her co-authors — Ann Bartel, Meredith Slopen, and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, and Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia — have been surveying employers with 10-99 employees in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to learn about the effects of paid family leave. As part of their annual questionnaire, they have asked firms in New York and New Jersey to share their overall attitudes toward the policy. This is how they were able to reliably gauge in this latest study how small business owners and managers were feeling about paid leave on the eve of the pandemic.

Another advantage of the survey is that it focuses on employers’ experiences with paid family leave during COVID and not, as most other polls have done, only on workers.

Rossin-Slater says that assessing employers’ overall attitudes, in addition to measuring effects on operational issues, provides further evidence as to whether businesses are harmed by paid leave.

“Actual views provide a summary of how businesses think the policy is affecting operations,” she says. “If it was a disaster and really hard for them, they’re probably not going to be very supportive. The opposite is likely if their experience was smooth and not complicated.”

In all, 539 New York and New Jersey businesses that participated in the 2019 survey also responded in 2020, rating their opinions on paid family leave according to a 5-point scale. The researchers analyzed changes in opinions within each firm and controlled for other factors that could have changed over the time period, such as the total number of employees and their characteristics. They found that the share of employers reporting that they were very or somewhat supportive of the policy rose by 9.6 percentage points, from 61.6 percent to 71.2 percent. Meanwhile, the portion of firms that were somewhat or very opposed declined by 8.8 percentage points, to 11.2 percent.

The increase in support was somewhat larger among employers with 50-99 workers, although the rise in favorable opinions was also meaningful among even the smallest employers in the study. The researchers also found that employee use of state paid leave during COVID was associated with more favorable employer views.

“What’s striking,” Rossin-Slater says, “is that during COVID — when it’s become incredibly clear how important it is for workers to be able to take time off work with pay and job protection to care for ill family members or for kids who are out of school — employers became even more supportive of paid family leave.”

Rossin-Slater says that one drawback to the study is its relatively small sample size. Over the years, she and her collaborators have surveyed 4,711 employers. Of the 1,151 that responded to the 2020 survey, 887 were operating. About two-thirds of those still in business answered questions about their attitudes toward leave and whether workers used it during the pandemic.

Even so, shedding any light on what employers think about paid family leave is important, she says.

“As economists, we focus a lot on measurable impacts like productivity or turnover rates, and those are important to quantify,” Rossin-Slater says. “But at the end of the day, whether these policies get passed is ultimately a political question, and people’s attitudes shape the public discourse in this country. Understanding how attitudes change, especially during a pandemic, is insightful for thinking about where this policy is ultimately headed.”