{"id":380,"date":"2007-02-07T16:31:35","date_gmt":"2007-02-07T23:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/?p=380"},"modified":"2007-02-07T16:32:38","modified_gmt":"2007-02-07T23:32:38","slug":"what-do-the-us-and-swaziland-have-in-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/?p=380","title":{"rendered":"What do the U.S. and Swaziland have in common?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This isn&#8217;t, sadly, surprising news &#8211; but a study came out last week showing that the U.S. has some of the weakest workplace policies in the world for families. According to an AP article on\u00c2\u00a0the Harvard\/McGill University study,\u00c2\u00a0we lag &#8220;far behind virtually all wealthy countries with regard to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, paid sick days and support for breast-feeding&#8230; Notably, it says the U.S. is one of only five countries out of 173 in the survey that does not guarantee some form of paid maternity leave; the others are Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.&#8221; The article goes on to say that\u00c2\u00a0the Labor Department\u00c2\u00a0is considering scaling back the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gives workers up to a total of 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year. How depressing!<\/p>\n<p>Q and I are lucky in that we live in California &#8211; the only state that provides paid family leave. (And our employers have been great to us, also.) But what about people who live elsewhere? Or who can&#8217;t afford to take unpaid time off to be with their child? Even before I became a mom, I recognized the importance of family-friendly workplaces &#8211; and I can&#8217;t believe the U.S. isn&#8217;t stepping up and enacting new, better policies!<\/p>\n<p>(Okay, I&#8217;m done with my political rant now.)\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>-M<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This isn&#8217;t, sadly, surprising news &#8211; but a study came out last week showing that the U.S. has some of the weakest workplace policies in the world for families. According to an AP article on\u00c2\u00a0the Harvard\/McGill University study,\u00c2\u00a0we lag &#8220;far behind virtually all wealthy countries with regard to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-to-3-months"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}