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By Omar Mohammed
Reporter, Economy & Finance
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More than half a million workers took time away from work to care for their children in October as more companies extend parental leave as a benefit to attract and retain talent in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
About 600,000 U.S. employees stopped working in October, staying home instead as part of their maternity or paternity leave, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed Friday, the highest monthly figure since the agency began recording the trend in 1993.
The record number of people taking up such benefits coincides with the expiration of billions of dollars of COVID-era child care support that helped women return to the labor force in historic numbers.
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"What's been happening is, and I have even seen it in my own workplace, where families stagger out the leave they take because of a shortage of child care," Diane Swonk, chief economist at consulting firm KPMG, told Newsweek.
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The end of COVID-era child care subsidies suggests, by some estimates, that 70,000 child care facilities may be forced to close down, according to a report by the Century Foundation, putting enormous pressure on working families that rely on them for support.
"That doesn't mean they'll close down [immediately], it just means that they're getting more squeezed and, over time, we're going to see even fewer of them at a time when it's very expensive and very hard for parents to manage it," Swonk said.
Parental leave benefits have seen an uptick and American workers have increasingly used them, as the cost of child care—which in some states could be as high as $500 per week—has soared. This year, nearly 40 percent of companies in the U.S. have offered paid maternity leave, with 32 percent also providing paid paternity leave, a 5 percent jump for each perk from the previous year, according to a report by The Society for Human Resource Management.
Swonk said lack of child care has made such benefits, for women especially, crucial for people to stay working.
"The child care crisis does make for difficult decisions in terms of what the trade-offs are for working or not, but we have seen an increase in prime-age women's participation," she said.
One recent study by Oxford Economics showed that 3.3 million women were set to enter the labor market over the next five years, after years of stagnation following the surge that kicked off in the 1960s but leveled off in the 1990s. Should that trend continue, it could add 0.2 percent of growth to the U.S. economy, researchers found.
"In my own life, the people who work for me get full parental leave, which is wonderful. I had to work through two maternity leaves. I was live on TV four weeks after I delivered my daughter and that's not something I'd wish on anyone," Swonk told Newsweek.
The jump in availability of parental leave increased during the post-pandemic labor market boom, as employers had to compete for workers.
"Policies have been shifting and during the pandemic, benefits accelerated along with wages and that's one of the benefits that also picked up," Swonk said.
It's important that businesses think about the welfare of employees, including their mental health, Swonk said, and the pandemic and its aftermath may have forced companies to think differently.
"People didn't used to have to really have to attract workers in different ways and when you need all hands on deck, all of a sudden, people get a lot more creative about how they attract everyone in the labor force," Swonk told Newsweek.
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