SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 2010 “
KLMNO
God, what is that hair? Soooooooo yesterday.” — California GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, reporting, she says, a friend’s reaction to her opponent, Barbara Boxer
Born in the U.S.A., then back to work W
by Sharon Lerner
hen it comes to paid ma- ternity leave, the United States is in the postpartum dark ages.
One hundred and sev-
enty-seven nations — including Djibouti, Haiti and Afghanistan — have laws on the books requiring that all women, and in some cases men, receive both income and job-protected time off after the birth of a child. But here, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 provides only unpaid leave, and most working mothers don’t get to stay home with their newborns for the 12 weeks allowed by the law. Many aren’t covered by the FMLA; others can’t afford to take unpaid time off. Some go back to work a few weeks after giving birth, and some go back after mere days. The century-long battle for maternity
leave in America is a story of missed op- portunities and historical accidents, fur- ther slowed by activists’ miscalculations and some well-funded opposition. In oth- er words: It didn’t have to be this way. As far back as 1919, when the Model T was switching from a crank to an electric starter, the U.S. government came close to signing on to an International Labor Or- ganization agreement, supported by 33 countries, that said women workers should receive cash benefits in addition to job-protected leave for 12 weeks in the pe- riod surrounding childbirth. That same year, Julia Lathrop, the chief of the Labor Department’s children’s bureau, issued a report on international maternity leave policy in which she decried the United States as “one of the few great countries which as yet have no system of State or na- tional assistance in maternity.” She had recently returned from Europe, where Germany and France had paid-leave laws that had been in place for decades. But this first real drive for maternity
leave fell victim to petty infighting. Though many members of a key labor group wanted to include “maternity in- surance” in its recommendations to Con- gress and President Woodrow Wilson, it was omitted after an internal dispute over who would be covered. Other early propo- nents of maternity benefits got tripped up by whether to insist that protections and income for pregnant women be part of na- tional health coverage (which, sadly, they seemed to think was around the corner). At other times, history has intervened. When women flooded the workforce dur- ing World War II, the Labor Department’s women’s bureau recommended that women get six weeks of prenatal leave, as well as two months following childbirth. Then, just as pressure for change was mounting, the war ended, men returned home to reclaim their jobs, and the drive fizzled.
KIM ROSEN
Politics have posed an even bigger ob- stacle. The debate over maternity leave has long served as a proxy for tensions surrounding the presence of women in the workplace. Remember that, until 1978, it was legal in most states to fire women for becoming pregnant; some conservatives defended the practice as a way to encourage women to return to the home.
But even some feminists objected to giving women job-protected time off around birth, because they felt that their gains were too precarious, and their de- termination to ascend from the pit of sex discrimination was too great, to risk drawing further attention to maternity. In
the early 1970s, some women challenged school board policies requiring pregnant teachers to take maternity leave for sever- al months before and after birth. So it wasn’t entirely surprising that, when Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) spearheaded a national proposal for leave in 1984, it en- countered the same resistance. “Influential feminist activists in Wash-
ington opposed maternity leave because it wasn’t treating women the same as men,” says Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Lawat the University of Cali- fornia at Hastings. “They said: ‘No, no, no. We don’t want national maternity leave. We want to fold maternity into other med- ical needs.’ ”
And that is what ultimately happened. During the decade or so when advocates pushed for what would become the Fami- ly and Medical Leave Act, their working definition of what leave should include shifted. At first, it applied only to mothers, then to new parents and later to all work- ers who need to care for family members. This change was good in that it allowed fa- thers to be more involved and helped broaden political support for leave legisla- tion — but it came at a price: The prospect of so many would-be leave-takers made business interests more aggressive than ever in their efforts to make sure that the time off wouldn’t be paid. “In Europe, it’s parental leave,” says Ste- ven Wisensale, a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut and the author of “Family Leave Policy: The Politi- cal Economy of Work and Family in Amer- ica.” “When you get into family leave and you’re suddenly concerned about caring for elderly people, it becomes a little more nebulous.” And so, after years of debate, during which Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) filibustered and President George H.W. Bush twice vetoed family leave legislation, the law President Bill Clinton finally signed in 1993 was so shrunken from its original form that it was barely recognizable. Earlier versions would have given all
workers 26 weeks for medical leave and 18 for parental leave. But in its anemic final form, the Family and Medical Leave Act grants only 12 weeks off and covers only a little more than half of workers, leaving out those who work for companies with fewer than 50 employees or who have logged less than 1,250 hours in the past year. And because the leave is unpaid, many of those who are covered can’t af- ford to take the time off.
T
he impact of our national policy is brutal. According to research by economists Sara Markowitz and
Pinka Chatterji and published in 2008 by the National Bureau of Economic Re- search, women who return to work soon after the birth of a child are more likely to get depressed than other mothers. They’re also less healthy: According to the study, longer maternity leaves are associ- ated with improvements in mothers’ over- all health.
And, not surprisingly, the lack of time
together hurts mothers’ relationships with their infants. Mothers who went back to work before the six-month mark were less likely to tickle, play with or cud- dle their infants than those who returned between six and nine months after giving birth, according to a 2006 nationwide study by Child Trends, a research group. The effect of all this on babies can be se- rious and lasting: In an article published in the The Economic Journal in 2005, re- searchers found that infants whose moth-
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ers had 12 weeks of maternity leave or fewer had lower cognitive test scores and higher rates of behavior problems at age four than children whose mothers had longer leaves. In Europe, longer paid ma- ternity leaves are linked to lower infant and child mortality. But as inadequate as the FMLA is, its
passage offers useful lessons. Liberals who spearheaded the effort managed to make common case with some conserva- tives concerned about “values” issues. For example, they won over Henry Hyde, then a Republican congressman from Illinois who opposed maternity leave, by convinc- ing him that job-protected time off from work would help bring down the abortion rate.
If a new drive for paid leave is to gain
traction, similar alliances will be key. Sup- port is strong across the ideological spec- trum, should anyone try to span it. Ac- cording to a survey of more than 3,400 adults conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation and Time in September, 62 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of evangelical Christians believe that busi- nesses should be “required to provide paid family and medical leave for every worker who needs it.” With support even higher among Democrats, it’s hard to think of another issue that unites so many voters but remains so perennially neglect- ed.
Another challenge will be to explain to businesses that they aren’t expected to bear the financial burden. In California and New Jersey, the states that already provide paid family leave, benefits — in both cases, up to six weeks off, partially paid, for workers to care for either a sick family member or a new baby — are fund- ed entirely by employee contributions through an extension of the states’ tempo- rary disability insurance plans. Finally, states probably need to pass
paid leave laws before such legislation can succeed nationally. Unpaid leave followed this pattern; at least 34 states had enacted unpaid family leave laws by the time the FMLA was signed. Auspiciously, the Oba- ma administration’s budget for next year includes $50 million for a State Paid Leave Fund that would help launch state programs. “This money is really important. Al-
ready, about half of the states are doing something to move toward paid leave — holding hearings or introducing legisla- tion,” says Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families. “This could be the push that would enable them to take that next step.” With that next step as a start, maybe we could have a national paid leave law by, say, 2019 — only a century after we missed our first opportunity.
Sharon Lerner is the author of “The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation.”
Oil wells at Spindletop, in southeastern Texas, ushered in an oil boom at the start of the 20th century.
TEXAS ENERGY MUSEUM VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS Why Big Oil is sticking with the devil it knows oil from B1
Oil is drilling deeper and finding ways to convert unconventional oil — petroleum extracted by means other than traditional wells, from sources such as oil sands, coal and oil shale — into gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. These companies have little reason to do otherwise: The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there is enough unconven- tional oil in the world to meet our needs for generations to come. And Big Oil’s business model is far from troubled. If oil prices shift from their old range of the past two decades of about $35 per barrel to a new plateau of $70, let alone $100, as some consider likely, extracting oil is go- ing to continue to be exceedingly profit- able, even if the cost of extraction contin- ues to rise. The industry is unfazed by the challenges
of extracting unconventional oil. Its exper- tise, after all, lies in building multibillion- dollar facilities to collect, transport and process fossil fuels. “The history of the in- dustry has always been to . . . extend access to new resources . . . and increase the recov- eries from existing production assets,” Don Paul, then the chief technology officer at Chevron, remarked several years ago. “Most in the industry do not believe we are any- where near the end of this process.”
Professor Peter Odell of Erasmus Uni-
versity, winner of the 2006 OPEC Award from the International Association for En- ergy Economics, suggests that the oil in- dustry of 2100 will be larger than that of 2000, but up to 90 percent dependent on unconventional oil. And, its advertising to the contrary, the industry isn’t shy about making such estimates itself: ExxonMobil forecasts that fossil fuels will account for the same 80 percent share of world energy used in 2030 as they do today. We have heard Chevron officials spec-
ulate that biofuels might account for up to 10 million barrels of fuel per day in 20 years or so — but that still represents less than 10 percent of future worldwide oil needs. “Global energy demand is going to increase 40 percent by 2030,” Jeffrey Ja- cobs, vice president of Chevron Technol- ogy Ventures, recently told Bloomberg. “It is not feasible for biofuels to replace con- ventional fuels.” There is, of course, another option avail- able to Big Oil. It involves replacing petro- leum with hydrogen fuels and biofuels made from nonfood sources, and produc- ing electricity from wind, solar, biomass and other renewable energy sources. And the industry is investing in these alterna- tives: ExxonMobil has committed $600 million to algae-based biofuel research and development, and BP has pledged
$500 million to biofuel researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Law- rence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois.
But while these dollar amounts surpass
what the U.S. government and other in- dustries are spending on biofuels re- search, they represent a minuscule in- vestment for the largest oil companies, which each generate at least $150 billion per year in revenue and $10 billion or more in profit. ExxonMobil’s multiyear al- gae investment amounts to one-half of 1 percent of its petroleum capital and explo- ration expenditures over the past five years. By contrast, consider that Shell has partnered with Qatar on an $18 billion project to convert natural gas into liquid. The oil industry’s involvement in bio- fuels is best characterized as a fallback plan in case the world’s governments im- plement aggressive climate policies or OPEC and other oil-rich nations — where state-owned oil companies reign supreme —further restrict foreign access to oil. Big Oil is fundamentally mismatched to the project of developing alternative fuels. The corporate culture and core compe- tence of oil companies favor large, central- ized investments; these conglomerates are skilled at building massive structures and investing enormous amounts of capital in pursuit of oil.
Biofuels, by contrast, depend on vast amounts of land and relatively small, la- bor-intensive production facilities that differ fundamentally from the engineer- ing-dominated oil business. Even the larg- est corn ethanol plants are a fraction of the size of fossil-energy facilities, for the simple reason that the resource is dis- persed and expensive to collect in one large central location. That’s not the case with coal or oil or natural gas. For the same reasons, other forms of re-
newable energy — those derived from the sun, wind and water— are equally un- suited to Big Oil’s talents. The industry’s enthusiasm for new fuels
is further dampened by the fact that it has more than $1 trillion sunk in oil wells, re- fineries, pipelines and service stations in the United States alone.
And so oil companies are, quite ration-
ally, investing the equivalent of pennies in biofuels and other alternative energies, compared with dollars in unconventional oil prospects. But while they are behaving logically in economic terms, they aren’t serving the public interest. Drilling in un- charted territory is dangerous, as we have seen, and unconventional oil extraction carries the potential for any number of en- vironmental disasters. The current situa- tion in the gulf, where BP was tapping hot, high-pressure oil almost 31
⁄2 miles below
the ocean floor, is only a prologue to the saga of how complex and costly our oil habit will become, if left unchecked. If the major energy companies don’t
embrace alternative energy, where will the hundreds of billions of dollars come from to develop and launch renewable fuels? The venture capital community is in- vesting heavily in biofuel technology, but those sums are still tiny compared with what’s needed — and compared with the resources available to oil companies. The large food-processing companies that have played a central role in the expansion of the ethanol fuel industry haven’t stepped up to the plate, either. No matter what, Big Oil will be investing enormous amounts of money in energy pro- duction and infrastructure in the years ahead, up to an estimated $1 trillion over the next decade. If these investments con- tinue to go disproportionately toward un- conventional oil, the consequences will be both dirty and dangerous.
on
washingtonpost.com
Deborah Gordon and Daniel Sperling will discuss
their article Monday at noon at
washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
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