The Allegheny County Board of Health obviously has no idea what it takes to run a business.
Why else would it propose that all private businesses in the county — no matter how small and no matter how few employees — be required to offer up to 18 weeks of paid parental leave per child birthed, at full pay no less?
That’s four-and-half months a year.
Should the Board of Health give final approval to the plan after a 30-day comment period, Allegheny County Council could vote on the measure in July. Workers would be eligible for the leave after 30 days on the job.
Make no mistake: This is public policy at its worst.
The health board says its proposal recognizes paid parental leave as a “critical public health strategy that supports healthier outcomes for infants, birthing parents, families and communities.”
But the board apparently has chosen to wear blinders to the other real-world consequences of such a policy.
Many employers, especially smaller ones, simply will not be able to afford this proposed county government mandate. It very well could force them to close or move out of Allegheny County.
That’s a “healthier” outcome for no one.
And what of larger companies with the prospect of having multiple scores of employees off at the same time – and for months on end> Oh, and did we mention, as the Post-Gazette does, that “if parents … work at the same company, they can take leave concurrently or consecutively”?
But, but, but, as Pittsburgh Public Source notes, Allegheny County employers could fund the parental leave through the use of private insurance programs. That, of course, is not without cost to those employers who typically operate on razor-thin margins.
This parental leave mandate might as well be called the “Allegheny County is Closed for Business Act.” What small business, the backbone of the larger economy, will want to stay open, open anew and/or relocate to Allegheny County?
And, no, the “answer” is not to publicly fund such a program, as some jurisdictions have. Those bills always come due. And higher taxes, too.
Whether a private employer wants to offer paid parental leave outside of any existing offered paid time off (PTO) plan should be the exclusive purview of those respective private employers, not the government.
Indeed, it might be more palatable if the county’s parental leave mandate had some sense of being earned instead of an entitlement. To wit, and as with sick leave, accrued over employees’ hours worked.
But that’s still an impost on businesses that they can ill afford, forced upon them by government fiat.
The Grassroots Institute of Hawaii concluded that such programs, in general, “add to the cost of doing business. … Employers would have to compensate for the increased costs associated with the program, which could mean fewer jobs or stagnant wages.”
And that could be true for even the largest of larger employers, we add.
Writing on the Mises Wire website in 2023, economist Roger McKinney stipulates that common sense tells us that it’s good for mothers and fathers to spend as much time as possible with new babies.
“However, the conclusion that businesses or the government must pay for this time is another fallacy—a non sequitur, or a logical leap across the Grand Canyon. Fathers and mothers should save and pay for the leave themselves,” the economist says.
“The most pro-family policy is to lower taxes for all families so that they can take home more of what they earn” and pay for such things on their own, McKinney says.
Eureka! Voila! Who woulda thunk it?!
“Good economic thinking requires people to consider the long-term effects,” he stresses. So does sound public policy.
The Allegheny County Board of Health fails on both counts. And Allegheny County Council must reject such failures, born out of rank intellectual vapidity.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
