This morning, the joint legislative task force on paid family leave held the third installment of its ongoing, free-floating symposium on the unanticipated complications and unintended consequences of this mammoth new mandate.
Today's session combined a continued roundtable on which state agency ought to run the program (ESD? L&I?) with a riff on how its $45 million per year cost ought to be funded (general taxes? payroll taxes? sin taxes?)
The best moment came when the labor representative on the task force, making a pitch to house the new entitlement in Labor & Industries, admitted that the long-term goal is to expand the program to other kinds of leaves beyond paid time off for the birth or adoption of child. This point was reiterated by a rep from the state AFL-CIO, who in public testimony claimed L&I was the best agency in which to see the program grow and expand.
Of course we've known about labor's designs all along, and have had a little fun with it now and then. And we've certainly noted Gov. Schwarzenegger's veto this week of efforts to expand California's first-in-the-nation program. But the question bears asking: with a task force apparently paralyzed by its inability to reach consensus on how to administer and fund the smallest increment of paid leave the legislature could support, is it appropriate to base decisions now on the assumption that the program will, and ought to, expand into difficult and contested areas of medical leave?
A memorandum to the task force from the Employment Security Department spells out the concern -- having to adjudicate medical claims will exponentially increase the already eye-popping cost of this mandate:
Both L&I and ESD have concerns about the possibility of expanding the scope of the new Family Leave Insurance Program. The estimates provided by each agency are based on the legislation as passed, which limits the scope of the new program to leave taken for the birth of a child or for the adoption of a child. Regardless of which agency is selected, the program will be built on the assumption that Family Leave Insurance claims will be straight-forward, with no medical certification involved.
... If the scope of the Family Leave program is expanded to later include medical leave, new assumptions would be required.
"New assumptions," in the context of bureaucratese, means "more costs."
