New Family Leave Law in Colorado Could Be Model for US

Voters in Colorado ushered in a major victory for women workers during last year's elections — and advocates are hopeful that it has laid the groundwork for common-sense paid leave policies across the country.

Proposition 118, the first paid leave law in U.S. history to pass by ballot measure, was approved overwhelmingly on Election Day, garnering 57.75% of votes cast by 86.87% of voters in the state. Colorado will now join eight states and the District of Columbia in offering paid leave to workers — which can provide critical economic stability, especially to women and people of color.

“The need for paid leave touches almost everybody at some point in their working lives, whether it’s to care for a new child or deal with their own serious health issue or the health issue of a loved one — and yet, only a minority of working people in this country, disproportionately higher-wage workers and professional workers, have access to any kind of guaranteed paid family and medical leave,” Vicki Shabo, senior fellow for paid leave policy and strategy for the Better Life Lab at the policy think tank New America, explained. “The disparities by economic status and by race are such that the very people who need paid leave the most are least likely to have it.”

Colorado’s policy was designed to address those stark gaps in economic stability. Currently, one in five Colorado workers have to decide in times of family crisis whether to go to work or take care of themselves and the ones they love, a decision that falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the state’s lowest earners.

A cost-share program makes the policy fiscally sound and financially accessible to those who need it most: The premium is only 0.9% of an employee’s wages, which employers can cover entirely or split with workers, and a shared pool coordinated by the Department of Labor ensures equitable coverage for employees at even the smallest businesses in the state.

Employers and employees will start paying into the program in 2023 — and beginning in 2024, 2.6 million Colorado workers will gain access to up to 12 weeks of paid leave per year to cover needs related to the birth or adoption of a child, serious health problems for the worker or their family members, or even coping with domestic and sexual assault and abuse or stalking. The smallest businesses will be able to offer the coverage to employees at no cost, and the lowest-wage workers in the state will receive 90 percent of their regular salary in times of crisis.

The movement for paid leave in Colorado that led to Prop 118 began a decade ago, when the national organization 9to5 asked its members which workplace equity issues mattered most to them. Paid leave overwhelmingly dominated their responses: 9to5 members recalled missing wages, losing out on opportunities for advancement, and struggling to re-enter the workforce after months or years of being a primary caretaker at home.

“Women are generally the primary caretakers in their households in Colorado: Two-thirds of women are the primary income earners in their households, and two-thirds of low-wage workers are made up of women,” Ashley Panelli, co-chair of the Colorado Families First campaign for paid family and medical leave and paid leave campaign manager with 9to5 Colorado, explained. “When something comes up, like having a child or needing to care for an ailing parent or spouse, that burden is really falling on women — and there’s just not that much infrastructure to allow them to have that work/family flexibility.”

The lack of paid leave was, for too many women, “compounding into widespread economic instability.” In response, 9to5 leaders in Colorado began building a coalition of small business owners, advocates, and organizations that worked tirelessly to keep the subject on legislative agendas and advance support for such policies among voters. (By the time Prop 118 saw victory, over 200 businesses were actively engaged supporters.)

In 2014, the coalition tried its hand at passing a paid leave law in the state legislature, but failed; over the next six years, that cycle continued to stall and spin. Despite growing public support for paid leave, another attempted paid leave law in 2019 was the most-lobbied-against piece of legislation in the state. Insurance interests and corporate interests were spreading misinformation about paid leave laws, claiming they would bankrupt employers and the state government.

When the bill failed, the Colorado legislature created the Family and Medical Leave Insurance Task Force — which ultimately issued a report pointing to a series of recommendations, backed up by rigorous research and a panel of diverse voices, that echoed the demands of 9to5’s coalition.

Jared Make, vice president of the workers’ justice organization A Better Balance, saw firsthand how the task force’s work fueled the eventual victory of Prop 118. “There were insurance industry representatives; there were business voices, both supportive and ones that maybe weren’t as much on board with this issue; health perspectives; and really just a huge range on the issue itself,” he recalled, “and yet, we were still able to come to pretty strong consensus on almost all of the issues we were asked to look at.”

“We pushed back a lot to ensure that the right policy was introduced,” said Panelli. “And when we realized that that wouldn’t happen legislatively, everybody decided the best avenue was the ballot.”

That the campaign to pass Prop 118 took shape during a global pandemic was pure chance — and it presented a slew of challenges. In order to gather signatures of support, 9to5 contracted with a vendor to hand out packaged pens that individuals could unwrap, use to sign, and then take home or throw out. Coalition members from all sectors had to collect signatures from a safe social distance, and instead of going door to door, volunteers relied on phone-banking and text-banking to do outreach to voters. Organizers had to produce digital rallies, virtual panels and presentations, and online debates.

But advocates were quick to add that COVID-19 did not swing the Prop 118 fight. “People understand the urgency and the gaps, maybe more than they had before, but this has been a widely popular, widely sought-after policy for a long time,” Shabo explained. “COVID is the tipping and crystallizing point.”

“Something that made the ballot campaign run so smoothly was the fact that we’d already laid the foundation for this coalition for so many years,” Panelli noted. “A lot of the steering committee members of the ballot campaign were the same steering committee members from the family legislative coalition. When it came to getting small businesses and organizations and advocates to sign on, this wasn’t a new conversation.”

National polls during the pandemic showed an increase in support across party lines for protective measures like paid leave that allow workers to grapple with familial crises without losing their jobs — but even before the pandemic, support for such policies was growing in both parties. Nationally, however, COVID did usher in a breaking point for millions of Americans, and it shifted the conversation around policies like paid leave.

“We often are asked how much paid leave will cost,” Shabo noted, “but what the data show is that the real question is: What are we losing now by not providing this basic security to people?”

The pandemic laid bare the answer to her question: Millions of U.S. workers gained access to paid sick leave and family care leave for the first time when Congress passed relief bills for COVID-19; but millions of workers also lost jobs, faltered on rent and mortgage payments, and began lining up in cars at local food banks to provide for their families.

The United States is the only wealthy country without a national paid leave policy. Colorado’s recent victory proved that common-sense paid leave laws are popular across lines of difference and political division, and it provides a model for future campaigns in other states. Polling in advance of the November election found that Prop 118 was “backed by double-digit margins by men and women of all ages, income groups and education levels in every region of the state,” including with Republican voters.

“The tremendous victory in Colorado really underscores what public opinion survey after public opinion survey has told us to be true, which is that paid family and medical leave is a common-sense, nonpartisan issue for people,” Shabo explained. “It’s only when you get into the halls of legislatures and the halls of Congress where there becomes this deep partisan divide. This is something people want. It’s something they need. It’s something they think is worth investing in. And, as the voters in Colorado did, when they have the chance to speak on it, they’re overwhelmingly supportive.”

And as paid leave policies gain steam in different states and municipalities, demand also grows for a cohesive and unified federal policy. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are both individually supportive of paid leave policies, and they have included paid leave in their national agenda. When it comes to what lies ahead in 2021 and beyond, advocates are hopeful.

“[One] really exciting aspect of the win here in Colorado is how strong of a win it was,” Make explained. “It was bipartisan. It really was an issue that united Colorado. It won in areas of the state that were rural to suburban to urban. It won in counties that are seen as Republican strongholds and it won in Democratic strongholds as well. Seeing what a big win it was is also a big boost to a national solution — because it shows that this is an issue that unites Americans.”