 |
|
|
|||||
Even as paid family leave has stalled at the federal level, a growing number of states have taken up the issue in recent years. Thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have now passed legislation that makes paid leave mandatory, while a handful of other states have also introduced voluntary systems that leave it to private insurance companies and employers to opt into the benefit. Despite those legislative wins, however, a new report by the nonprofit Moms First and McKinsey indicates that many eligible workers in states with mandatory paid leave are not taking advantage of their access to the benefit. The analysis focused on the paid-leave programs in New York, New Jersey, and Californiawhich were among the first states to offer the benefitand also surveyed over 2,000 parents in those states. Who is eligible for paid leave The vast majority of working parents were eligible for paid leave, in spite of the variation in state-specific requirements for wages or time worked. But the report found that only 40% of eligible parents actually used their paid-leave benefits in 2022, which were worth an estimated $6,000 to $10,000 per person. The families that did take advantage of those policies reported being nearly twice as satisfied with paid leave than they were with other state benefits; at the same time, parents were less likely to take paid leave when compared to similar government offerings like unemployment benefits. Even as more states have adopted laws mandating paid leave, most workers across the country still lack access to it: As of 2024, only 31% of full-time employees in the U.S. had paid leave. There are a number of reasons why utilization of paid leave may be lower than expected, given how critical the benefit can be for families. First is a lack of awareness, which might explain why parents are more likely to use unemployment benefits; of the respondents who did not use paid leave, 60% said they did not know it was available. Why workers don’t take paid leave Other parents were aware of the benefit but didn’t feel comfortable using it, either due to concerns over job security or career progression. “I would have taken [paid family leave] if I could afford it and wouldnt lose my job,” one New York-based mother told Moms First. Low-wage workers were especially likely to worry about whether they could afford to take leaveeven in New York, where the paid leave law explicitly promises job protection. In some cases, there were concerns over wage replacement, since paid leave laws typically only cover part of an employee’s salary (anywhere from 60% to 90%, depending on how much they earn). But the report also indicates that the very disparities that make paid leave so important play a role in why many parents are not fully utilizing the benefit. Since women are more likely to shoulder a greater share of childcare responsibilities, there are fewer women who are eligible for paid leave. In some cases, they may not meet the wage or time worked criteria mandated by state law. (Overall labor participation is also higher for men than it is for women.) In many cases, the cost of childcare can lead one parent to drop out of the workforce and stay home with their childrena burden that disproportionately falls on women. On the other hand, while more men are eligible for paid leave benefits, they are less inclined to use themhalf as likely, in fact. (The unused parental leave captured by the report came to a total of six million weeks, with men accounting for four million.) A number of male respondents actually noted that they didnt think it was necessary to take leave if their partner was already doing so. Race, too, seems to play a role in how widely paid leave is utilized: On the whole, Latino and Black parents are less likely to be eligible for the benefit than white and Asian parents. When they do have access to it, however, Black parents are the most likely to use paid leave. Administrative challenges Another significant hurdle is the administrative burden of applying for paid leave. While many parents who used paid leave expressed satisfaction with the benefit after the fact, almost 60% who opted out said they were frustrated by the application process. Even when paid leave is provided by the state, the vast majority of parents relied on their employer to help guide them through a complicated process, which is likely easier to navigate at large companies that are better positioned to assist their workers. In the absence of a federal lawwhich lost traction after the pandemicadvocates for paid leave have pushed for legislation at the state level, leading many progressive states to adopt mandatory policies over the past decade. But the Moms First report makes clear that without increasing utilization of paid leave, countless parents are not reaping the benefits, from offsetting the steep cost of childcare to improving health outcomes for mothers and children.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has dropped several enforcement actions against companies like Capital One and Rocket Homes, just weeks under new leadership and turmoil at the agency caused by orders from Trump administration.In notices of voluntary dismissals filed on Thursday, the CFPB dropped lawsuits it had brought against Capital One, Rocket Homes, Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, and others.Those suits were all filed under the agency’s previous director, Rohit Chopra, who President Donald Trump fired just weeks ago. The CPFB has since plunged into turmoilwith the White House later ordering it to halt nearly all its work. The administration also closed the agency’s headquarters and moved to fire scores of its workers.Trump has defended his administration’s broadside against the CFPBincluding recent claims about the agency being “set up to destroy people.” But supporters of the agency stress that it provides crucial oversight and protects consumers from being vulnerable to predatory business practices.Trump nominated former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation board member Jonathan McKernan to be agency’s new director, who faced a Senate committee hearing Thursday.The CFPB is tasked with creating rules and taking enforcement actions to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices by a wide range of businesses and other institutions. Since its founding, the bureau has said that it’s obtained nearly $20 billion in financial relief for U.S. consumersin the form of canceled debts, compensation, and reduced loans.Legal action from the CFPB often involves banks, mortgage servicers, credit card companies, student loan processors, payday lenders, money transfer providers, credit reporting agencies, and debt collectors.Last month, prior to Trump taking office, the CFPB sued Capital One for allegedly misleading consumers about its offerings for high-interest savings accountswith the bureau accusing the banking giant of “cheating” customers out of more than $2 billion in lost interest payments as a result. Meanwhile, its January 6 suit against Vanderbilt Mortgage accused the lender of pushing consumers into loans they couldn’t afford to buy manufactured homes. And the CFPB’s December complaint against Rocket Homes alleged a “kickback scheme” from the company to illegally steer prospective borrowers to Rocket Mortgage, which operates under the same parent company, and away from other competitors.But all those cases will now be discontinued with Thursday’s actions. Court filings in the Rocket Homes case notes that the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, dismisses this action, with prejudice, against all Defendants.” Dismissing a case with prejudice means that it cannot be refiled. Similar wording was used in the dismissals of the CFPB’s Capital One and Vanderbilt Mortgage suits.In a statement Thursday, Rocket Homes welcomed its dismissal and said “it is good to see the truth come to light.” The company called the suit “an empty claim brought forth by former CFPB director Chopra for the sole purpose of seeing his name in headlines during the final days in public office.”Capital One welcomed the CFPB’s Thursday decision, too, noting that it had “strongly disputed” the action filed against the company. The Associated Press also reached out to Vanderbilt Mortgage for comment.The CPFB isn’t the only federal agency to signal a pullback on previous enforcement action under the new administration. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, has either closed or paused legal action against several cryptocurrency platforms in recent weeks, as the regulator tries to present itself as more crypto-friendly under Trump.Earlier this month, Binance and the SEC filed a joint motion to pause its high-profile lawsuit against the crypto exchange. And both Coinbase and Robinhood have said that cases against them have also been dismissed or closed, although the SEC declined to immediately comment further. Wyatte Grantham-Philips, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Democratic lawmakers demanded answers from billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on Thursday as concerns about who has access to America’s most sensitive information continue to dog Trump administration efforts to reshape the federal government.The systems accessed by Musk’s DOGE staffers include billions of data points about citizens and businesses, as well as potentially sensitive information about government payments and programs that, if assembled correctly, could reveal secrets about national security and intelligence operations to Russia, China, or another adversary.Musk and the White House so far have not convinced their critics and have offered few details about their cybersecurity measures as their tech-centered approach to shrinking government roils Washington.In a letter sent to Musk and the White House, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., demanded to know the details about security precautions and whether lapses in security may have exposed sensitive information. The letter asserts that reckless actions by DOGE present a “grave” threat to national security by exposing secrets about America’s defense and intelligence agencies.“DOGE employees do not appear to fully understand much of the information to which they have been given unfettered access and given the cavalier and incompetent ways that they have handled this data, these individuals represent a clear threat to national security and the nation’s economy,” wrote Warren and Connolly, who were joined on the letter by several other Democratic lawmakers.Musk and President Donald Trump have defended DOGE’s work, saying it’s led to billions of dollars in savings. In response to the concerns raised in Thursday’s letter, a spokesman for the administration said it’s vital that DOGE workers have access to federal databases.“It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it,” Harrison Fields, principal deputy White House press secretary, said in an email Thursday. “DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on.”If that information is mishandled, or security precautions fail, the information could be exposed to foreign intelligence services or common hackers, prompting significant worry among some national security and cyber experts.Groups worried about DOGE have challenged its actions in court, with a federal judge in Manhattan temporarily restricting DOGE from accessing some Treasury Department information until its members can be certified in cybersecurity. Another recent ruling blocked DOGE’s access to certain records at other agencies, too.Federal laws and regulations were written to tightly control the management of sensitive federal dataeven if it has little value to scammers or foreign spies. Certain officials only have access to certain data, and access to information from the same data set may be split among different people as an additional security measure.Classified data has always been subject to more stringent rulesdesigned to minimize the risk that it could fall into the wrong hands. Access to such information is tightly controlled, said Jeffrey Vagle, a law professor and cybersecurity expert at Georgia State University who has in the past worked on classified federal technology projects.It’s unknown what steps DOGE has taken to ensure security, Vagle said, which called worrying by itself. If they store data on flash drives, access it on a personal device or comingle systems, they could be creating huge security vulnerabilities, he said.“A foreign agent wouldn’t even have to try that hard,” Vagle said.Information in federal systems includes Treasury payments that could be used to figure out the details of intelligence programs or health and personnel records that could reveal the identities of agents or the responsibilities of clandestine officers.An adversary like China could use artificial intelligence to analyze these kernels of data to create a picture of covert U.S. activities, said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.“In the intelligence business, information is the coin of the realm,” Warner said. “These bits of information could unravel the very sources and methods our nation relies on to keep Americans safe. And it could literally get people killed.”In their letter, lawmakers cited concerns that DOGE staffers used unauthorized servers and unknown AI programs to analyze and store the data. They noted that despite assurances that the DOGE website will not reveal information from intelligence agencies, material from the National Reconnaissance Office was easily found.The Democrats also said they worried DOGE was cutting spending without understanding its purpose, pointing to a recent incident in which the government tried to bring back workers it had fired who worked on nuclear weapon programs.Earlier this week, more than 20 DOGE staffers resigned, saying they would not use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.” In a joint resignation letter, they warned that many of those brought in by Musk are political ideologues who lack the necessary skills or experience for the job.U.S. intelligence agencies have, so far, escaped the same scrutiny or level of cuts that DOGE has leveled at other agencies. Employees at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were told they didn’t need to comply with Musk’s demands for federal employees to list their recent accomplishments or risk termination.Some of the concerns raised about DOGE may be motivated by politics and concerns about its rapid pace, said Zach Edwards, senior threat researcher at Silent Push, a cybersecurity firm that worked on President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.But Edwards said DOGE’s tech-centered approach could lead to mistakes that would have been caught in the old system.“They’re moving fast and breaking things,” Edwards said, quoting the popular tech catchphrase. “With government, if you break things, it can take a long time to fix it.” David Klepper, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||