Susan Gross Sholinsky Quoted in “Parental Leave Refresh Can Help Curb Pandemic Resignations”

Following is an excerpt:

The U.S. is experiencing a wave of resignations, with U.S. Department of Labor data showing 12 million people voluntarily left their jobs between April and June, nearly 2 million more than the number who quit in the same time frame in 2018. The Labor Department also reported that job openings skyrocketed to a record-high 10.1 million at the end of June, the highest level since the agency began collecting this data more than two decades ago. …

Company leaders should also consider revamping their existing parental leave policies and their practices for doling these benefits to make sure they're being handled fairly and not opening the business up to discrimination liability.

"Employers do need to be careful," said Epstein Becker Green employment partner Susan Gross Sholinsky. "They clearly lost a lot of women during the pandemic, and to the extent that people are going to have children, employers likely want to be careful and make sure their parental leave policies, in particular as they pertain to female employees, are fair."

As company leaders take a fresh look at their leave options for new parents, here are six tips for updating their policies and procedures to better attract and retain workers, plus avoid discrimination liability. …

Rethink Differentiated Leave Options

While some companies differentiate between primary and secondary caregivers in their family leave plans, Epstein Becker Green's Sholinsky said the line between these distinctions has been blurred during the health crisis, making it a good time for company leaders to reconsider if this kind of delineated policy still makes sense.

"The pandemic, if anything, has given people more pause as to who really is the primary caregiver versus the nonprimary caregiver, because especially with both parents home, many are participating in the child rearing," Sholinsky said.

She said she's received more questions about whether it's appropriate to distinguish between those types of categories, and she advises employers that it's still legally aboveboard as long as they're not providing unequal benefits along gender lines.

A series of federal lawsuits that played out between 2014 and 2019 have made clear that parental leave plans that systematically provide inferior parental leave benefits to fathers aren't legal.

However, while distinguishing between who is the primary and secondary caregiver is technically fine, experts said employers can still get into trouble if their plan makes assumptions about the genders that fit in each role.

And with the global health crisis making the division of labor in child rearing less defined, Sholinsky said it's a good idea for company leaders to reconsider the distinction in their plans.

"I encourage companies to think about whether there should be, and they're still interested in having the distinction," Sholinsky said. "As companies live with the primary and nonprimary caregiver distinction in their handbook, and get questions about it from their employees, I think some companies are saying, 'You know what, I don't know that it makes as much sense as we used to think it does to make that distinction.'"