Congress appears on the verge of passing two sweeping measures, President Biden’s Build Back Better Act (BBBA, HR 5376) and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, HR 3684), but negotiations continue in an effort to add key provisions that are not included in the BBB Framework released last week, including a national paid leave program. The $1.75 trillion BBBA and the $1 trillion IIJA together make critical investments in dealing with the climate crisis, strengthening human infrastructure and rebuilding our physical infrastructure. But paid leave and other provisions were dropped from the BBB framework released by the White House last week following opposition from Senator Joe Manchin, D-WV, who holds a deciding vote in the 50-50 Senate. | |
However, negotiations continue on potential additions to BBBA, with paid leave supporters, led by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, and Patty Murray, D-WA, mounting a last-minute campaign to restore at least some provisions of paid leave, which had been in the plan up until the last few days. While the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) supports quick passage of both BBBA and IIJA, there continues to be a strong business case to include paid leave, for which ASBC has advocated for years with our coalition partners. A paid leave program will help small businesses be competitive in hiring with larger companies that can offer these kinds of benefits, it will improve employee morale and productivity, it will improve consumer confidence and help boost our economy, and a study conducted by ASBC and Panorama released in late 2019 shows paid leave programs have no worse than a neutral return on investment, but often produce positive results to ROI. Please join our effort to remove the United States from the short list of countries that have no national paid leave program by signing on to this letter to your Senators and Representative. You can also call your members of Congress by clicking here. | |
